Writing Hyperintelligence

[arachnekallisti]

I've just been thinking over the fandoms I'm really drawn to, and it occurs to me that one thing they have in common is incredibly intelligent characters: Sherlock Holmes, Miles Vorkosigan, the Doctor, Batman, the Culture's Minds, Q, Agatha Heterodyne, Willow, Toshiko, Romana...

The question is, how does one go about writing characters like that? At the baseline, you've got the ones who are at the top end of human intelligence, and then you're off into the realm of the superintelligences.

I think it was Vernor Vinge who claimed that authors cannot write convincing characters who are smarter than themselves: if you could work out what a really smart person would do in a given situation, then you are as clever as that really smart person.



The problem with this particular point of view is that authors can cheat. They don't just control the character, they control the character's environment and the nature of causality, and they can arrange them to produce a decent facsimile of hyperintelligence. Such tricks can include:

1. A Peek at the Script
The author can allow the character astonishing information gathering and deductive abilities, by feeding them clues that they can spin a plausible-sounding narrative of deduction around. This is pretty much Holmes' entire schtick, although Batman and the Doctor use it too. Ideally, the author should be able to plant the clues in such a way that the reader is thinking "oh, of course" when the final conclusion is announced, rather than "wtf did that come from?"

2. Think Fast
The character has thirty seconds to think, and then comes up with a plan that it took the author six weeks to come up with. Miles Vorkosigan is the unquestioned master of this, although the Doctor's no slouch either. The important bit is for the author to have actually thought the plan through, rather than relying on a string of fortunate coincidences; if the character has left a bit of the plan shaky and open to random chance, then random chance should damn well stick its oar in, and force them to come up with a patch on the fly.

3. The Long Game
Works best for the truly inhuman intelligences here. In which it transpires that their plans work on such a massive scale that they affect whole civilisations, rather than just individuals. Again, this does need to avoid the Happy Coincidences route if it's going to look plausible. Done best by Asimov in the Foundation novels, and it only really works because he does include a situation in which the Grand Plan breaks down, and then lets the Second Foundation deal with it.



Any good ones I've missed? Any more caveats on how to deploy those three?

Comments

[spawnofweevil.livejournal.com]

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[prochytes.livejournal.com]

One interesting variant on your 2 is what one might call Balls in the Air. This reflects the fact that some really smart people can not only think insanely fast, they can also think about a lot of different things at the same time.

One terribly sweet example of this happens when Sarah Jane's kids run into Ten under (spoiler-protected) desperate circumstances. Luke, Rani, and Clyde all excitedly gabble a torrent of questions at him simultaneously. Ten then raises a hand for hush, and rattles through the answers to every single of them.

A more brutal, but equally engaging, instance happens when Batman composes and orchestrates (via telepathic link-up) a plan to deal with a mastermind opposing the JLA ("You like to play games, General? Let's play") at the same time he is personally in hand-to-hand combat with a superhuman ninja.

[prochytes.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that as well as what one might call the structural aspects to handling hyper-intelligence, which you have enumerated, there are also the garnishes: common tricks of style and/or treatment that can help to suggest the effect. For example:

A. The Dog in the Night-time. This runs off your 1. above. The hyper-intellect fixes on something as important, but does not explain (yet) why it is important, or what it does to the other data. It helps a lot if the phrase the hyper-intellect drops is an evocative one (as in the Sherlock Holmes example that gives the title). This is taken to a lovely extreme in the film (though not the book) of Evil Under the Sun, where Poirot is asked how he solved the case. He replies that one just needed to pay attention to a number of things, ending with "... a bathing cap, the noon-day gun, the breath of the sea, and the height of the cliff. From that you should be able to solve it yourselves".

Note that last sentence, by the way. This leads us neatly to...

B. "What is it like in your funny little brains?"

This is when the hyper-intellect genuinely has trouble seeing why others cannot spot the (to him or her) blindingly obvious, and tends to get confused about the intellectual capabilities of "normal" people. This can be played for quality angst, of course: consider the antagonist in "A Study in Pink", endlessly frustrated at why people just don't think properly, or Toshiko's lonely desire for someone to see that she is "Special". But it can be chirpier, as in the title quote from Sherlock. One might also instance the Doctor asking whether anyone does recreational mathematics anymore in "42", or (historically) Macaulay's belief that every schoolboy could recite his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards. [Probably not true even in Macaulay's day. I can do the Prime Ministers backwards, but there are not quite so many...]

C. The Power of the Paratext. Some media offer some effective means of suggesting hyper-intelligence in action visually. I am thinking here of the floating symbols in Sherlock, or the play-back/freeze effect in "The Eleventh Hour". There is also a wonderful sequence in "No Man's Land" when Batman is trying to immerse himself in his "Bruce Wayne: Billionaire Playboy" persona wandering through a casino, only to find that he cannot switch off the instinctive hyper-awareness and deductive skiils of the World's Greatest Detective. While one set of captions is conveying his main interior monologue, another one running in tandem represents the ceaseless business of the Bat-brain as he saunters around from table to table ("...switched decks, cards are marked... Stripes is sleeping with Blue's husband...").

[prochytes.livejournal.com]

On the subject of caveats (or "caveant", I suppose), one might note that a potential difficulty with 1. is that it is not really sufficient to indicate that a particular causal chain could produce the data under analysis; one also has to demonstrate that no other causal chain could produce the same effects. In the study of history, my revered mentor dubbed this the "Doing a Poirot" fallacy; there is further discussion on p215 of my book (*shameless plug*). There might be multiple explanations for how that mud splash got there, or why that bus was late, or why that woman's hair is parted on the wrong side.

On the other hand, one can get hyper-critical here. Just because multiple scenarios could explain a set of data does not mean that all those scenarios are equally likely; there is nothing wrong in suggesting that hyper-intellects sometimes play the percentages. Think of it as like quizzing: there are numerous possible answers to a question which begins "Number One London..." but that does not stop us from buzzing immediately with "The Duke of Wellington".

Thoughtful authors often acknowledge this by simply having their hyper-intellects play the percentages and get it wrong sometimes. Holmes is not right in all the deductions he makes from the walking-stick at the start of The Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, and Sherlock gets one quite significant fact wrong about Harry Watson in "A Study in Pink". It is handled quite engagingly in The Mentalist. This usually hand-waves how Jane reaches his conclusions, but it does nicely highlight how a certain proportion of his schtick is percentage-play by having him get it wrong every now and again.

Speaking of Jane, it strikes me that there is a less global version of 3 where the author simply exposes how carefully the hyper-intellect plans ahead. (Of course, it can be argued that this is more of a Crazy Prepared thing than a super-smart thing, but the two often run together - there is a reason why we associate both tropes with Batman.) On one occasion, Jane exposes a false paraplegic by observing the scuffs on the man's shoes - when he is then asked what made him scramble under the table to look, he admits that he has found an excuse to inspect the shoes of every paraplegic he has met in the last twenty years on the off-chance, and that this is the first time it has paid off. In similar vein, I was delighted to see "Journey's End" confirmed my own suspicion (instantiated in fanfic) that Toshiko would have installed post-mortem contingency plans in the Hub.