From "About Poul Anderson" in the 1985 edition of Brain Wave:

What would happen if...

Those are magic words, and the writer who chooses to follow out their intention finds himself suddenly released, in a world unbounded by here and now and open to the farthest reaches of logic and imagination.  What would happen if philosophers were kings, if men could live forever, if the human race could suddenly surmount the limits of its present intelligence?

Such a train of thought has been the starting point for some of the most fascinating works of imaginative fiction, and it is to this class of informed speculation that BRAIN WAVE belongs.  Poul Anderson (the pronunciation lies midway between "pole" and "powl") is, like many of the best writers in science fiction, a graduate physicist.  (The physical sciences seem to be producing as many authors as medicine did a generation ago.)  As such, he brings to fiction that sense of the possible that the widening horizon of science often bestows.