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marycatelliWas remembering the post I wrote making your characters wise and pondering the aspects of it that apply to making a character appear smart, or even just clever.
It's a bit easier than wise in some aspects, because some of it can be glossed over. If the general arrives at the battlefield, takes in his retreating men, and raps out, "Gentlemen, that position on the right must be retaken!" -- you can then award him victory without going into details about how crucial it was. Or the engineer can glance over an engine and ask if the screws are a bit loose over there.
But not always. Sometimes you actually have to master the stuff. This calls for rip offs, big time. Find a past battle noted for strategic brilliance and use it. Perhaps have your character talk about how this situation has happened in the past.
One particular point is when the character's making scientific discoveries. The prize has to go to the novel where an alien was born in a society of flat-earthers. He discovered that the world was round, that it was orbiting another body, and that it was in danger of being destroyed through falling into Roche's limit, so he declared they needed a space program to escape. (AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!) The important thing to research is what arguments were made against it, and what was needed to refute them. If you have a Galileo figure, have someone point out if we went on a grand circular tour every year, we would be nearer some stars at one solstice, and nearer to others at the other, yet the stars always look the same to us, or that we all know the difference between sitting still and moving, and yet by his argument we are always moving and should feel it and see its effects. You can have the Galileo character claim that the tides are in fact caused by the water sloshing about due to the planet's motion. You can even have the opponent point out that we do not obstruct our vision when we want a clear sight, so why is he claiming that obstructing his vision with two warping pieces of glass makes his vision better? Indeed, that one might be best, because the evidence for the other two was unavailable in Galileo's time; his physics experiments are the foundation of physics, but none of his claims about the heliocentric system are considered evidence nowadays. You can have your character demonstrate that he sees more clearly through the telescope though.
I still remember reading G. K. Chesterton's George Bernard Shaw and his comment on how Shaw rejected that experiment the purported to show that acquired traits were not inherited by chopping off mice tails for generations and showing that the great-to-nth generation grew tails just as long -- which meant, Shaw pointed out, nothing about acquired traits, since having an experimenter chop off your tail is not an acquired trait, any more than being in a railway accident is. He had a point.
A problem more both subtle and pervasive is making the character appear smart even when not doing obviously smart things. Which, come to think of it, applies to wise characters, too, who should show good judgment regularly. But a prime example is Carthoris in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books. At one point, he shows off two brilliant mechanical inventions he made, which appear to be sui generis. At no other time does he give the least hint of being an inventor. He's not even interested in machinery, or noticing machinery where it appears. Which is like many other alleged geniuses, who take out their brilliance only when it's needed. They will notice things in their field of interest like any other character, and they will notice things and make connections faster. And most of them will use unusual words -- casually, spontaneously, easily, because all those words are in their vocabulary, and not flagged as unusual there. And above all else, correctly. Malapropping is a grave danger there.
It's a bit easier than wise in some aspects, because some of it can be glossed over. If the general arrives at the battlefield, takes in his retreating men, and raps out, "Gentlemen, that position on the right must be retaken!" -- you can then award him victory without going into details about how crucial it was. Or the engineer can glance over an engine and ask if the screws are a bit loose over there.
But not always. Sometimes you actually have to master the stuff. This calls for rip offs, big time. Find a past battle noted for strategic brilliance and use it. Perhaps have your character talk about how this situation has happened in the past.
One particular point is when the character's making scientific discoveries. The prize has to go to the novel where an alien was born in a society of flat-earthers. He discovered that the world was round, that it was orbiting another body, and that it was in danger of being destroyed through falling into Roche's limit, so he declared they needed a space program to escape. (AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!) The important thing to research is what arguments were made against it, and what was needed to refute them. If you have a Galileo figure, have someone point out if we went on a grand circular tour every year, we would be nearer some stars at one solstice, and nearer to others at the other, yet the stars always look the same to us, or that we all know the difference between sitting still and moving, and yet by his argument we are always moving and should feel it and see its effects. You can have the Galileo character claim that the tides are in fact caused by the water sloshing about due to the planet's motion. You can even have the opponent point out that we do not obstruct our vision when we want a clear sight, so why is he claiming that obstructing his vision with two warping pieces of glass makes his vision better? Indeed, that one might be best, because the evidence for the other two was unavailable in Galileo's time; his physics experiments are the foundation of physics, but none of his claims about the heliocentric system are considered evidence nowadays. You can have your character demonstrate that he sees more clearly through the telescope though.
I still remember reading G. K. Chesterton's George Bernard Shaw and his comment on how Shaw rejected that experiment the purported to show that acquired traits were not inherited by chopping off mice tails for generations and showing that the great-to-nth generation grew tails just as long -- which meant, Shaw pointed out, nothing about acquired traits, since having an experimenter chop off your tail is not an acquired trait, any more than being in a railway accident is. He had a point.
A problem more both subtle and pervasive is making the character appear smart even when not doing obviously smart things. Which, come to think of it, applies to wise characters, too, who should show good judgment regularly. But a prime example is Carthoris in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars books. At one point, he shows off two brilliant mechanical inventions he made, which appear to be sui generis. At no other time does he give the least hint of being an inventor. He's not even interested in machinery, or noticing machinery where it appears. Which is like many other alleged geniuses, who take out their brilliance only when it's needed. They will notice things in their field of interest like any other character, and they will notice things and make connections faster. And most of them will use unusual words -- casually, spontaneously, easily, because all those words are in their vocabulary, and not flagged as unusual there. And above all else, correctly. Malapropping is a grave danger there.
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Date: 2013-02-02 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 02:00 pm (UTC)On the third hand, it shifts the problem from knowing enough to look convincing to having sufficient rhetorical skill to make it look like knowledge enough. 0:)
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Date: 2013-02-02 11:31 pm (UTC)very impressive job, worth clickiing on.
http://books.google.com/books?id=JMJ0hN01dO4C&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=chet+centaur+floozie&source=bl&ots=mcD2JEa6Tt&sig=9cIEE4d5AdjfKxEIQB60wgllTd4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Sp0NUZX7DY3MigKxvoHICw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=chet%20centaur%20floozie&f=false
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Date: 2013-02-02 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-02 02:01 pm (UTC)• none of his claims about the heliocentric system are considered evidence nowadays
Save the real stem-winder, when he observed that Venus went through phases just like the Moon. showing that it was nearer the Sun than we - while Mars did NOT, and meanwhile Jupiter was circled by moons of its own! How, and when, did that cease to be considered evidence? 'Cuz it sure was so at the time!
Isaac Asimov wrote a regular column for Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in one such he imagined the result if Earth's Moon was instead the moon of Venus, orbiting at the same distance &c. He pointed out that 'Cupid,' as he suggested for a name, would still be plainly naked-eye visible from Earth as a bright spark and constant companion to Venus - which would thus be immediately identifiable as the morning and the evening star (it's not intuitively obvious) and that, plus the in-your-face example of Cupid circling Venus, would prevent any hubristic 'geocentric' nonsense from ever starting.
• I agree - writing of a character whose intelligence exceeds your own is like having him speak a language you don't know. You might get away with it at a tourist phrasebook level, but original sentences are a different matter. And if it's an entire race of higher intelligence - well, as you say, that would express itself in so many ways that you'd have to be that smart to even imagine them. Joanna Russ' “Nobody's Home” is the best example I know; imagine if everyone had Dorothy Parker's IQ.
[Asked to use the word 'horticulture' in a sentence, she thought for about a deep breath's time and repled, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.” Few laughed: That was a degree of wit too removed from any normal compass.]
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Date: 2013-02-02 02:34 pm (UTC)Throwing about Jupiter's moons only underscores the weakness of the case. How on earth could their existence show anything about the heliocentric system to anyone not determined to see everything as such?
Which is Asimov's problem too. Really, that essay sounds like the fruit of a febrile imagination so encased in heliocentric dogmatism as to be blind. If the knowledge that the evening and morning star were the same prevented geocentricism, it would have done so once they worked it out. He is, in fact, so blinded that he does not notice the first and most obvious fact that supports geocentrism, that the Earth does not move, and it is silly to say that we are hurtling through space when we are obviously quite still. The physics required to explain why this is not so is quite complex and counter-intuitive.
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Date: 2013-02-03 01:12 am (UTC)I haven't read THE DISCARDED IMAGE lately, but such observations would be evidence against unchanging spheres above the moon, if they were still on the table at that time,.
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Date: 2013-02-03 02:07 am (UTC)And, as you observe, it would evidence against irregularity, like the supernova and the discovery that comets were above the atmosphere, not against geocentrism.
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Date: 2013-02-04 12:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-04 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-04 02:40 am (UTC)Interesting source:
http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=14.0#.UQ8eLB0739A
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Date: 2013-02-04 02:43 am (UTC)https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&rlz=1C1CHMO_enUS509US509&q=%22satellites+of+Jupiter%22+%22crystal+spheres%22&oq=%22satellites+of+Jupiter%22+%22crystal+spheres%22&gs_l=serp.12...453625.472905.0.478676.47.41.1.0.0.5.773.6387.14j16j8j2j6-1.41.0.les%3Beqn%2Ccconf%3D1-2%2Cmin_length%3D2%2Crate_low%3D0-035%2Crate_high%3D0-035%2Csecond_pass%3Dfalse%2Cnum_suggestions%3D2%2Cignore_bad_origquery%3Dtrue%2Conetoken%3Dfalse..0.0...1c.1.-jG71N0-vAI
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Date: 2013-02-04 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-04 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-04 12:11 pm (UTC)And Galileo, of course, sneered at Kepler.