Same Idea. Different books.
The books are Camp Concentration and Flowers for Algernon. Both are about a procedure that enhances intelligence and the story is told through a series of diary entries.
Flowers for Algernon
Published: 1959
Camp Concentration.
Published: 1967
Louis Sacchetti is imprisoned for refusing to fight in a war he does not believe in. He is experimented on and given a drug. This drug raises the intelligence of the user for the next several months until it ultimately decays the body and leads to death. The government who has imprisoned Louis is carefully monitoring him and seeing what use he can be to them.
A mentally disabled man goes through a procedure that increases his intelligence. This opens all different possibilities for him as his intellect soon passes that of the doctors who performed the operation. Unfortunately, the mouse “Algernon” who also had this operation soon begins to decline in the intellect gained by the operation.
It is a critique on the Vietnam War and the government experimenting on it’s own citizens. Dark, cynical, and humorous at times, this book tackles the question of what increased intelligence might produce.
Will increased intelligence impact the relationships we have? Will it change how we treat others and how we are treated in return? This book is emotionally charged and tries to get you to think of how you treat others.
Both have the same plot idea but the stories are quite different. Disch goes much darker as the government in his book have a “Ends justify the Means” approach. The book seems to focus on the intelligence of those who are experimented on. Trying to paint of picture of how they would actually react and what would they create. Keyes has a different approach to the idea. He focuses less on what a person might create but rather how society might treat an individual with increased intelligence and how that person would treat others. It’s a easier book to read but is more emotionally changed. Both do have the characters question if ignorance is indeed bless.
“ Genius is an infinite capacity for pain.”
“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”