Review: Brain Twister

Brain Twister by Mark (Laurence M. Janifer & Randall Garrett) Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun, relatively short book from 1962. You can tell it was written around then from internal evidence; it quotes Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech, from his 1961 inauguration, and then refers to him as "the youngest living ex-president," which anyone writing something that wasn't alternate history wouldn't say after his assassination in 1963. The action is set in 1971, perhaps to make the technological spec-fic element which creates the inciting incident slightly more plausible, and also to allow the existence of videophones, which are somewhat significant to the plot. As was usually the case with SF of the period, non-technological social changes are not featured.

It does exhibit the casual sexism of the times - young women exist mainly as amusements on a level with alcohol and cigarettes, both of which are also highly visible - but there is a significant, albeit older, female character who plays a major role in the plot. (She's referred to as a "sweet little old lady," but she's actually only in her late 50s; the authors were both in their 30s at the time the book was written, so maybe that seemed old to them.) She's a telepath, confined to a lunatic asylum, who believes she's the immortal Queen Elizabeth I. At that, she's saner than the other half-dozen telepaths the main character, a hapless FBI agent who puts his impressive achievements down to luck, manages to locate.

Why is he locating telepaths? Because a machine has been invented which can detect when people's minds are being read, and it's detected that the minds of researchers on a vital defence project are being read by an unidentified telepath, presumably for the benefit of the Russians. On the "set a thief to catch a thief" principle, the protagonist goes looking for more telepaths, and ends up dressed in Elizabethan clothes and being addressed as "Sir Kenneth" in order to humour the self-proclaimed queen. He's surprised to discover that he likes it.

The mystery side of the story wraps up, I felt, a little too quickly and neatly at the end, but the main reason to read it is for the comedy. That's why my wife, who listened to it on Librevox, recommended it to me, and it's just the kind of combination of absurd situations and sparkling language that we both enjoy.

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