he time is the mid-20th century. A rabbit caught in a trap figures out how to work the lever that sets it free. A young boy doodling with numbers invents differential calculus before breakfast. A simple-minded farmworker named Archie Brock is suddenly overcome by his first appreciation of the size of the universe.
Physicist Peter Corinth goes to work one morning to find everybody he encounters, from his colleagues at the university to the elevator operator who had previously been beneath his notice, having what seems to be the sharpest day of their lives. Everybody's a little bit smarter; everybody's having bright ideas they weren't intelligent enough to consider before. He thinks little of it at first, but then the average IQ leaps several hundred points in a matter of days, affecting all forms of animal life. Domestic animals achieve sentience, men of below-average intelligence become geniuses, and savants like Corinth become super-geniuses, causing shock waves that ripple throughout the entire civilized world.
Before long, an explanation becomes clear. A vast region of space, including Earth's solar system, had previously been affected by an energy-damping field that impeded the nervous system. Evolution had compensated, giving all life on Earth a level of intelligence sufficient to provide adequate thought capacity despite the influence of this field. When the solar system traveled outside of the field, every form of life with a brain now finds itself functioning without handicap. Civilization totters as menial workers find themselves no longer content to do what they now consider brainless work, as domestic animals revolt against their exploitation, and as the great thinkers find their ambitions outstripping their simple human passions. The change will soon take humanity to the stars—but the story's true heart lies in the limited ones who must still remain behind.
Humanity discovers a new destiny
Brain Wave's viewpoint belongs to physicist Peter Corinth, who not only diagnoses the reason for the change that has overtaken humanity, but exploits that change to take mankind to the stars. There is no doubt that Poul Anderson intended him to be the story's nominal hero.
But though Anderson does a marvelous job depicting how the world is altered by his strange reverse apocalypse, time has not been kind to his nominal hero. Modern-day readers may find Corinth just another typical whitebread stiff, spouting theories and explanations while the world collapses to rubble all around him. Granted that he eventually leads mankind to a higher destiny, he's just not all that interesting a guy—especially when he proves totally ineffectual at saving his homemaker wife, Sheila, from a cataclysmic breakdown brought on by alienation and the weight of all the fresh thoughts cluttering her head.
No, Corinth ultimately provides nothing more than global perspective on the disaster. The dramatic core of the novel belongs to the simple-minded farmworker Archie Brock. A vivid precursor to Charlie Gordon from the later Daniel Keyes masterpiece Flowers for Algernon, Brock finds himself elevated from simpleton to genius in a fortnight ... only to find out that with the rest of humanity elevated in equal measure, he remains just as limited in their eyes. He is just as alienated as he was before, only this time able to appreciate the horror of his position.
When Brock's previous employer abandons the farm, he stays behind to work it. Helped by a dog named Joe, who thanks to his own enhanced intelligence becomes more fully his partner in this endeavor than any dog of the old world could ever have been, Brock finds himself the leader of a growing community; his first recruits are a set of escaped circus animals, which include two chimpanzees and an elephant, who, having fled their prior domesticated existence, now possess the vision to see the survival value of joining Brock in a true community. By the end of the story, Brock has revealed himself as a natural leader—who just never had the smarts to know it before. It's a wonderful character arc, and the main attraction of this seminal work.
