Comment Re: far from first (Score 1) 66
"Hey may have hit it best, but he was far from first. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave [wikipedia.org], for example, came out in 1953-54. I think there were a lot of even earlier examples, but I don't have them at my fingertips."
Okay, fair. I might have slipped up on my wording.
It's been decades since my old days as a young'un reading all the old Pre/Gold/Silver age stuff. I certainly know who Poul Anderson is, but that exact story is the kind of thing that used to be really tough to find. It's still a little tricky, maybe six web links in Amazon can do it, but back even in the 80's trying to find a then-thirty-year-old story was really tough and I wouldn't have known it even existed to hunt it down.
D. K. and Flowers showed up because it was aggressively highlighted in some school class's curriculum. To be sure, it was worth the exposure, but that's different from trying to make a quick post and hold it to "researcher standards". At 1958 it is reasonably close to the top of the chain and I bet the writers of my examples had at least a phone call advising them "You know you're re-making Flowers for Algernon, right?"
But then there's your note, and if you moved the theme just a little, you might even get some slightly different earlier but not unrelated takes on the theme.