This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

Read: 3/7/2025 Source: The Hugo Winners Edited by Isaac Asimov

Of all the stories in The Hugo Winners edited by Issac Asimov, the one I dreaded reading was Flowers for Algernon. I read the novel version in middle school or high school, and I mostly remembered that it was depressing. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story was very absorbing and is probably the best story in this collection. Reading the Hugo winners in order this really feels like the first truly great story among the bunch. Prior to this the stories always had a pulpy feel. There was some movement toward sophistication in writing and ideas with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Block, but their stories still felt like they could have been an episode of The Twilight Zone or Original Star Trek.

Daniel Keyes really kicks us off into the New Wave Movement in Science Fiction with Flowers for Algernon though. He employees a literary prose styling and has well-rounded characters that allow us to see the impact of the speculated scientific advancement. The science itself is pretty minimal and is mostly hand waved away. Indeed, one critique of this story would be that how an operation could increase someone’s intellect is not really believable and at the end the explanation that Charlie has developed a proof for his theory on why enhanced intelligence will be lost is pretty unscientific. The use of the word proof in this case sounds more like Charlie has developed a mathematical proof, but this would not have anything to do with psychology or neurology. Scientific accuracy was not the focus of New Wave authors though.

Indeed, one gets the sense that Daniel Keyes was a teacher who enjoyed writing on the side. He spent the1950s working as an editor for comic book magazines, including Marvel Comics with Stan Lee. At the same time, he also earned a Masters of English, taught high school English and wrote stories on the weekends that he would sell to the comic book magazines he worked for. He thought the idea that became Flowers for Algernon was too good for a comic book story and he kept it for himself. He worked it into this novelette, which won the Hugo Award in 1960. He would expand the novelette into a full novel in 1966, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. 1966 was a busy year for Keyes as he also accepted a professorship with Ohio University and his science fiction career pretty much ended there. In 1968, he published his second and last science fiction novel and the film adaptation of Flowers of Algernon came out.

It is easy to call Keyes a one hit wonder. In Asimov’s introduction to this short story he recalls saying in his speech delivering the award to Keyes that he was not sure how Keyes had produced such a great story. Keyes responded, “Listen, when you find out how I did it, let me know, will you? I would like to do it again.” In the spirit of so many early science fiction writers, I think Keyes was simply writing as a hobby while he had his day job teaching and editing. The fact that his first story was such a huge success really seems like he was in the right place at the right time. I cannot really fault Keyes for returning to his passion for teaching and academia after the excitement for this story died down and science fiction moved on to the giants of New Wave Science Fiction like Herbert, Le Guin and Ellison.