Flowers For Algernon

Author: Daniel Keyes

Science fiction doesn't always handle the emotions very well, there's a tendency for sentiment to become sentimentality. But one novel really gets to the heart without any false mawkishness. Flowers for Algernon is science fiction's most sublime tragedy, and I defy anyone not to be moved by the story.It's the story of Charlie Gordon, who is educationally subnormal. He has a job at a bakery, where he is the butt of spiteful jokes by his fellow workers though he doesn't realise this, and he tries hard to better himself by attending school. Then he has the chance to take part in a revolutionary new procedure that will radically improve his intelligence. The story is told in Charlie's own diary, and we can see the procedure starting to work as his spelling improves, and the writing becomes grammatically correct. In fact, he becomes a genius, giving up his job at the bakery after catching his colleagues cheating the owner, then joining the researchers. He particularly observes the mouse, Algernon, who underwent the new procedure before he did. Then, just as the results are about to be announced publicly, he realises that Algernon is becoming confused again, and that the effects are only temporary.Frantically, he tries to find a solution, but we witness the writing in his diary slowly begin to revert to the ungrammatical and ill-spelled style it was originally. At one point, Charlie visits a local asylum, which he sees as a place of horror, but we know that he is inevitably going to end up there. If you don't choke up with the slow terror of the ending, there's something wrong with you.Why It Made the ListFlowers for Algernon was originally a short story that won the Hugo Award, when it was expanded into a novel it also won the Nebula Award, and it was then made into an Oscar-winning film, Charly.

Similar Recommendations

Frankly, Daniel Keyes never wrote anything to match the power of Flowers for Algernon, though you might want to check out his non-fiction novel, The Minds of Billy Mulligan, a journalistic account of the first person to get off a murder charge because of multiple-personality disorder.And there is really nothing else quite like Flowers for Algernon, it is unique.