"Flowers for Algernon"

[skillet]

This marvelous story haunts me everytime I read it. I also have a box of kleenex ready too. Sometimes, it's good for the soul to have a good cry. This story contains all the right elements for such a cleansing.

[Massa Charlie]

Yeah, I first read this in junior high school back in the 1970s. It was adapted for film and released as the movie Charly in 1968, but the movie didn't have anywhere near the same impact as the written story, in my opinion.

The question I always asked about this story was What sort of "brain surgery" did they perform on Algernon the mouse and Charlie Gordon the retard? Supposedly, it was some sort of operation to increase intelligence, but neither the story nor the movie ever came out and provided details.

The author, Daniel Keyes, apparently just alluded to a mysterious surgical procedure as a plot expeditor, which should have disqualified the story as "science fiction," even though I believe Flowers for Algernon won the top sci-fi award when it was originally published. To me, and to a lot of other hardcore science fiction readers, building stories around nonexistent scientific and medical techniques is not science fiction. More properly, we call that sort of writing science fantasy or the harsher space fantasy.

Real science fiction — and, remember, this is coming from a hardcore sci-fi reader — real science fiction starts with real science and builds up a fictional tale that is frighteningly believable, simply because it's based on real science.

Much of the work of Michael Crichton, for example, is actual science fiction: The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man and even WestWorld are really solid sci-fi classics. I know, somebody out there just shit in his pants when I said WestWorld, but Crichton built that story up based on animatronic technology such as that featured at Disney's Hall of Presidents, right, which opened in 1971. Crichton just took the technology a few steps further to create a completely animatronic amusement park called WestWorld.

Jurassic Park was another solid piece of science fiction from Michael Crichton. Yes, it was essentially a remake of WestWorld — same fucking plot, an amusement park goes shit-ass crazy and tries to kill the tourists, right. The only difference was that Jurassic Park was updated for the 90s with real, viable genetic engineering science.

Well, now I'm way off track from Flowers for Algernon, except that I was trying to draw a distinction between science fiction and science fantasy.

If I had to classify Flowers for Algernon, I wouldn't call it science fiction, because it's not really driven by science. It's more driven by the emotion of the reader, who starts out pitying Charlie Gordon, then progresses to a sense of wonder and hope and admiration for Charlie, and then falls back into an even deeper sense of pity and grief by the time the story ends. It's more like a tear-jerking drama than it is a sci-fi story.

Now, if Keyes had worked embryonic stem cells or deep brain electrodes or something like that into the story, I think it could qualify as a solid — if depressing — piece of science fiction. However, when he wrote the original story, the human brain was still a vast mystery to science, so his nondescript surgical procedure wasn't based on any real science.

Sort of the way Star Trek used the magical Transporter, right... The science behind it was nonexistent, wasn't even important to the story, it was simply a plot expeditor to cover a lot of ground in less than 45 minutes. Which is just one reason why Star Trek is actually space fantasy and not science fiction.

Jeez. I'm all over the fuckin' map here, I'm so off-topic.

:hnk

[ANH]

Great story. I never saw the film so I can't comment on that, but the print version reduced me to tears when I read it many years ago.

[skillet]

Oddly, I never got around to reading the book. The film was bizarre, in that I think Clif Robertson really did deserve his oscar--he was quite brilliant--but the film itself is pretty horrible. I don't know if the director ever made anything again--horrible and annoying use of split screen, wildly uneven pacing. But again, probably worth watching for the Robertson performance, and to see Dick Van Patten demonstrate why he was so much more comfortable in television dramas.

I had to say, the film version with Cliff Robertson had potential at the beginning, but took a u-turn down LSD/Sixties Highway. A more recent version of the story starred Matthew Modine as Charlie, and was, in my opinion, a much better adaptation. I agree with Massa Charlie, the "mysterious operation" was never explained, and was clearly a plot device, which I found to be very effective. I often wondered if the author ever considered a possible sequel; I always assumed Charlie eventually died. I think that ending was one of the best I ever read; I remember when I read it the first time, it took me days to get over it. 'Course, I cried for days at the end of "Charlotte's Web" too when I first read that, many moons ago.

[Taylor]

I loved the story as a kid, and I really enjoyed the movie. That was Cliff Robertson's shining moment. If memory serves me well,wasn't Claire Bloom a "mature" hottie in the flick.

[Massa Charlie]

Cliff Robertson first played that role in a made-for-TV performance called "The World of Charlie Gordon" in the early 1960s, based on the 1959 short story Flowers for Algernon.... It appeared on Hallmark Hall of Fame or something like that, one of those programs that featured videotaped dramatic performances.

Anyway, Robertson first played Charlie Gordon on TV, and he loved the story so much that he personally bought the screen rights and started trying to convince Hollywood to make it into a feature film — starring him, of course. It took a long time because the short story just didn't have the right Hollywood stuff, it was too one-dimensional, told entirely from Charlie's perspective.

So the author of the short story, Daniel Keyes, re-wrote Flowers for Algernon and turned it into a novel in 1965, which was the right thing to do, apparently, because Hollywood became very interested in the rewritten story. The movie "Charly," starring Cliff Robertson, went into production shortly thereafter and was finally released in 1968.

http://img701.mytextgraphics.com/photolava/2008/08/15/charly-4biy21nqm.jpeg


:hnk

[t_evl1]

I read the book I loved it, sad ending, but its great

[McCauley]

I enjoyed the book, it was definitely very sad.