Forum: Story Recommendations

Actually the latest chapter in A New Past is set in 2004.

You forgot the Author names for "Hindsight 20/20" and "The Reset Manifesto". The second one is Lazlo Zalezac.
Pfand X (also by LZ) is in a similar vein, I think some of his other stories may be in a similar vein.

It could be taken as a sign of real genius that he denies it, saying he is would attract the wrong sort of attention.

On the other hand, IIRC Peter Moore, the protagonist in Lazlo Zalezac's 'Reset Manifesto', denies being a genius; he merely utilises the skills of those who are geniuses. However, IMO Peter Moore is a good fit to my idea of what makes a realistic fictional genius, and any authors wanting to include a genius character in their stories would do well to read this story.

Genius is often used synonymously for a particular "idiot savant" type of talent, e.g. mathematics or music. Peter Moore's intelligence is more general in nature and really can't be adequately quantified. IQ tests are notoriously inadequate for such cases. Not saying they don't have their uses but I feel they tend to return many false negatives; in other words, a lot of time they don't pick up true talent.

What was Moore's real talent? IMHO, the ability to craft tools from disparate parts in order to achieve an objective. Much like early man crafted tools (examples are spears and other weapons) once an objective was identified. For some of my snobbish engineering friends, they'd say he was just a talented engineer, i.e. a good problem solver. Maybe. But given the breadth of his achievement, that characterization would fall a bit short.

I may have just gone the long way around to say I agree with you -- he was a genius, fictional or otherwise. And one of my favorite Zalezac characters.

Swooping off-topic, there are a lot of stories in which the protagonist is proclaimed by the author to be a genius and, without fat-shaming the authors, I find virtually all of them to be unconvincing.

I am going to chime in with my $0.02.

You have to be a genius to write a convincing genius.

An idiot-savant and/or prodigy level skill in a finite area is doable, but a general purpose genius is not.

I am going to chime in with my $0.02.

You have to be a genius to write a convincing genius.

An idiot-savant and/or prodigy level skill in a finite area is doable, but a general purpose genius is not.

I'll have to disagree with this. A true cross spectrum genius would not likely be understood by the general population if they wrote to their intelligence level. If they downplayed their intelligence, they would likely come across as a prodigy or an idiot savant.

Stanford Binet IQ test results are a poor judge of 'genius' and to some degree, intelligence in general. Especially any revision of it past revision three.

Given the large number of factors not addressed by that test and many others, the concept of cross spectrum genius would necessarily be semi-subjective, and the result of a cross spectrum battery of all such standardized test.

In all, the probability of identifying a cross spectrum genius in literature would not likely be much, if any, above chance.