In the following excerpt, Small traces Flowers for Algernon through several incarnations, and praises it as a successful example of fiction that answers the question "what if?"

Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon appeared first in the form of a long short story in 1959 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in 1960 received from the World Science Fiction Society the Hugo Award for the Best Novelette of that year. It seems to have been immediately recognized as a piece of literature well above the routine, for it was anthologized in the next two years in Fifth Annual of the Year's Best Science Fiction, Best Articles and Stones, and Literary Cavalcade. In the years that followed, it re-appeared as a television play by the Theater Guild under the title, The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon, in 1966 in an expanded version as a novel, and later still in...