The Sherlock Holmes structure, where an everyman POV narrator watches the genius, must be easier to write than a genius POV. Carol O'Connell's Mallory crime books do the same - the possibly genius, possibly sociopathic hacker-skilled cop Kathy is always seen through the eyes of others. So we don't know HOW she hacks into things (nor what her real emotions are).
On this I only need study my daughters. I actually said to one of them last week (when she was assisting me at work) how impressive, she'd solved something cleverly and I said Do you think you're more intelligent than me? Without looking up from her laptop she nodded in the 'yes, that's universally understood' - ha. X
It seems to me that if you create the world in which the character lives then you are God for that world. The character's intelligence can be seen by how much of your created world they can figure out.
If they are more intelligent than you they can add to that world, destroy it or escape from it. For example: The Moriarty hologram in the TNG episode "Elementary, Dear Data" (written by Brian Alan Lane in 1988). Neil Gaiman expands on this idea a couple of years later in MiracleMan #19 with the robot version of Emile Gargunza building a "portable sustaining field" in an attempt to escape from the company of Andy Warhol-2.
I'm reminded of a sequence Alan Moore wrote in an early episode of the same comic where Mike Moran is trying to describe the difference between his own thought process and that of MiracleMan. He says that MiracleMan's mind thinks like poetry all the time. I've always liked that idea. Thinking like poetry. Seeing a bigger picture which goes several chess moves ahead and sees the pattern of everything. Us mere mortals only get that some of the time, when life isn't continually throwing us off-balance.
I imagine the best way to maintain a character more intelligent than myself is to treat that mind as inscrutable but almost always correct about the way things turn out. Probably too mature to yell "Told ya so!" unless yelling that makes the character more quirky and interesting to the reader.
I also think of the TV series "House MD" starring Hugh Laurie. Written by multiple writers so there might have been a room full of them tossing around ideas of how to keep Doctor House perpetually cleverer than everyone. No matter how clever the character may be they are still only figuring out what the writer wants them to.
It's the biographer's stock-in-trade (perhaps?) - but I'd nominate the Republic - why not read it as a novel? The author (Plato) masquerades as an ordinary bloke ( the narrator) who happens to have been present at the events described, where the genius, Socrates, presided. The narrated dialogue is a quintessentially novelistic format. Compare Plato with Conan Doyle (great essay question)?).
There’s Joyce depicting Stephen Daedalus, who thinks he is a genius (and is also Joyce himself).
From a different angle: A D Nuttall used to argue that Hamlet is Shakespeare depicting an extremely clever main character, and that through the following tragedies the protagonists became more and more unintelligent, ending with Lear, and that the later tragedies were all the greater for it.
Asimov's Hari Seldon was a genius at predicting the future but somehow the story held out for several lengthy novels. The author's genius was in creating a crystal ball which was affected by human frailties.
I think this is a really interesting area for discussion. I find the concept of genius tricky anyway, it so often correlates with privilege. This dilemma puts me in mind of the De Botton quote "A millimetre outside their expert area of expertise, geniuses can be countered on to be a silly as the rest of us".
In Psychotherapy I'm often approached by clients who are professionally or academically very successful, yet their relationships, their everyday conversations with others, cause them immense problems. Their everyday interactions might even appear more stilted and less "sophisticated" than most people. In couples work this sometimes presents as a person closing off or shutting down in overwhelm, withdrawing and sulking or angry outbursts.
It's perhaps a trite example but one of the things I enjoyed about the book Stoner is how excrutiating the systemic dynamics and conversations are.
The Sherlock Holmes structure, where an everyman POV narrator watches the genius, must be easier to write than a genius POV. Carol O'Connell's Mallory crime books do the same - the possibly genius, possibly sociopathic hacker-skilled cop Kathy is always seen through the eyes of others. So we don't know HOW she hacks into things (nor what her real emotions are).
On this I only need study my daughters. I actually said to one of them last week (when she was assisting me at work) how impressive, she'd solved something cleverly and I said Do you think you're more intelligent than me? Without looking up from her laptop she nodded in the 'yes, that's universally understood' - ha. X
It seems to me that if you create the world in which the character lives then you are God for that world. The character's intelligence can be seen by how much of your created world they can figure out.
If they are more intelligent than you they can add to that world, destroy it or escape from it. For example: The Moriarty hologram in the TNG episode "Elementary, Dear Data" (written by Brian Alan Lane in 1988). Neil Gaiman expands on this idea a couple of years later in MiracleMan #19 with the robot version of Emile Gargunza building a "portable sustaining field" in an attempt to escape from the company of Andy Warhol-2.
I'm reminded of a sequence Alan Moore wrote in an early episode of the same comic where Mike Moran is trying to describe the difference between his own thought process and that of MiracleMan. He says that MiracleMan's mind thinks like poetry all the time. I've always liked that idea. Thinking like poetry. Seeing a bigger picture which goes several chess moves ahead and sees the pattern of everything. Us mere mortals only get that some of the time, when life isn't continually throwing us off-balance.
I imagine the best way to maintain a character more intelligent than myself is to treat that mind as inscrutable but almost always correct about the way things turn out. Probably too mature to yell "Told ya so!" unless yelling that makes the character more quirky and interesting to the reader.
I also think of the TV series "House MD" starring Hugh Laurie. Written by multiple writers so there might have been a room full of them tossing around ideas of how to keep Doctor House perpetually cleverer than everyone. No matter how clever the character may be they are still only figuring out what the writer wants them to.
It's the biographer's stock-in-trade (perhaps?) - but I'd nominate the Republic - why not read it as a novel? The author (Plato) masquerades as an ordinary bloke ( the narrator) who happens to have been present at the events described, where the genius, Socrates, presided. The narrated dialogue is a quintessentially novelistic format. Compare Plato with Conan Doyle (great essay question)?).
There’s Joyce depicting Stephen Daedalus, who thinks he is a genius (and is also Joyce himself).
From a different angle: A D Nuttall used to argue that Hamlet is Shakespeare depicting an extremely clever main character, and that through the following tragedies the protagonists became more and more unintelligent, ending with Lear, and that the later tragedies were all the greater for it.
Asimov's Hari Seldon was a genius at predicting the future but somehow the story held out for several lengthy novels. The author's genius was in creating a crystal ball which was affected by human frailties.
I think this is a really interesting area for discussion. I find the concept of genius tricky anyway, it so often correlates with privilege. This dilemma puts me in mind of the De Botton quote "A millimetre outside their expert area of expertise, geniuses can be countered on to be a silly as the rest of us".
In Psychotherapy I'm often approached by clients who are professionally or academically very successful, yet their relationships, their everyday conversations with others, cause them immense problems. Their everyday interactions might even appear more stilted and less "sophisticated" than most people. In couples work this sometimes presents as a person closing off or shutting down in overwhelm, withdrawing and sulking or angry outbursts.
It's perhaps a trite example but one of the things I enjoyed about the book Stoner is how excrutiating the systemic dynamics and conversations are.