The Escape, Poul William Anderson

Poul Anderson is another legendary science fiction writer who wrote during the Golden Age of science fiction. I don't recall having read any of his books before, so The Escape will be the first for me. It is freely available at Feedbooks.com.

At this point, I'm almost 3/4 the way through the novel. I think it's brilliant. It's a real work of genius. It's quickly shaping up to be the best science fiction story I've read this year. 

The book has some resemblance to George Orwell's Animal Farm. Animal Farm is the story of how some animals grow intelligence to rival their human owners, and rise up against them. However, this story takes it a step further. It's not just the animals: it's the humans, too.

There are essentially two narrative paths that Anderson writes from: a farming laborer, and a physics theorist. The farming laborer was of below average intelligence. He required some help to function, but was strong physically, honest, and important to the farm.

The amount of intelligence that everyone and everything gains is 'quadruple' of what it was.

While the premise is great, some of the assumptions seem mistaken. There is a general growing panic. The growth of intelligence has created a great deal of fear. For Brock, the laborer, the effect hasn't taken place. While the farm manager has decided to quit his job and undertake a new experience, and Joe the other laborer decides to take off, he remains on the farm. This, in spite of the fact that animals are approaching human levels of intelligence. They are able to overcome obstacles like latches. They know how to use their power to win freedom. It creates danger for him, including a near death experience with a bull. Many others, from the narration of Lewis, the physicist, are also quitting their dreary jobs that are important for survival: garbage men, for instance, no longer find their jobs interesting enough to continue their work. While this may be true, it does not mean that people would automatically cut themselves off from employment which gives them a source of income.

Another assumption that Anderson makes is that communication becomes stunted. He writes,

The conversation here was rapidly becoming a new language. The old way of speech was too slow and cumbersome, loaded with redundancies, ignrant of a thousand subtle possibilities. When your mind was of quadrupled capability, a single word, a gesture of hand, a flicker of expression, could convey whole paragraphs of grammatical English.

I believe, contrary to what Anderson is suggesting, that intelligence creates more language and more communication, not less.

However, these assumptions that greater intelligence creates such problems is not unheard of in fiction. Many Americans believe that intelligence causes problems. In fact, people graduating from universities with degrees are finding themselves without the jobs they thought they could have. There simply doesn't seem to be the jobs requiring the type of intelligence that is required to thrive in the work place. Is this a problem with intelligence and education, or is it a problem with our economy? That is a question I have been asking myself for a little while this year.

I have now finished this ebook.

At the end of this ebook there is a mob which nearly kills the physics scientist. They have gone mad and seem to have lost their wits.

The last chapter has Archie Brock, the farmer's laborer, returning home to find the pigs and bulls having taken over the farm. His dog, Joe, has nearly died. To his rescue came an elephant and some apes which understand English (isn't it funny that the increase in intelligence gives them the ability to understand English, but not the man the language of any of the animals).

I don't think that intelligence leads people into madness. I see madness as a defect of the mind, not a defect of superior intelligence. 

Warning! This book 'is to be continued.' After looking around for awhile, I have discovered that this book is only a part of the longer work, Brain Wave. I had a hard time finding it. I did not find it for free anywhere as a Kindle book. But there is a PDF available at librelib.com.

I really hate reading PDFs on the Kindle. One is forced to choose: a reasonably sized font and having to navigate through the document left to right, and then down, or put it on horizontal, which is still a bit small for my bad eyes and deal with it. I did this with Stephen King's book on writing. I will do it again for this book. But I really, really don't like it. However, I have discovered that one can convert pdf to mobi at pdftomobi.com.