First published in 1966 and no less potent fifty years later, Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon is a justifiable classic, a science fiction story which, like so many of the genre’s finest, holds a mirror up to reality and gives us a glimpse at what might be. It follows Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68 who spends his days sweeping floors in a bakery, happily ignorant of how the world sees him, until he’s chosen for an experiment to artificially enhance his intelligence. The procedure has been successfully completed once before, on a white mouse called Algernon, but Charlie is the first human test subject.
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