“It’s an ongoing experiment,” [Ronald Hoeflin, a “severely gifted” man cited in the Voice this past week] says. “It has a certain science fiction quality — what is the maximum boundary of the human brain?”
I started reading Ender’s Game Saturday. Along with The Diamond Age, it’s got me thinking about models of intelligence, particularly in science fiction.
I’m not an expert on sci fi, by any means; I have a passing acquaintance (as well as the card from my Official Star Trek Fan Club membership, circa 1990). Normally the sci-fi I gravitate towards is heavy on world-building, with elaborate description of social norms and cultures. I had an argument with a Battlestar Galactica fan about this orientation a while ago; he finds Star Trek too much like watching C-SPAN, and prefers the simple engineering problems of his own show — how do you survive when you’re way out in space with no water, for example.
Models of intelligence in science fiction are probably a subset of my subgenre, but as I’ve gotten thinking about it it seems to me that they are rarely central to the futurism. They’re mostly taken for granted. So far (and I emphasize again I haven’t finished it), Ender’s Game seems to take intelligence as a preset guideline for the story.
The book follows a six-year-old boy who has been singled out by the leaders of his future world — indeed, bred at their behest, in a world where most people are only allowed two children, and he is his parents’ third — as the possible salvation of his society because of his gifts. The book so far has followed Ender as adults secretly manipulate him to improve his skills, other children beat the crap out of him, and he is steadily alienated from “normal” childhood by his incredible braininess and the situations it gets him into.
It seems to me that this “genius-child” theme is a persistent one in science fiction. I can’t come up with too many other examples right now; one might be the lesser-known book The Shockwave Rider; perhaps Wesley Crusher would be another? These books center on a protagonist who, by dint of breeding or genetic makeup, has superhuman powers of intelligence. What he does with his brain is important to the plot, but by beginning with an assumption that he was born this way, these books proceed on an “entity model” of intelligence, as I hear it called at Teachers College. In other words, smart is mostly who you are, not what you do.
And their brilliance is a burden, these books make it clear. So prodigious, in fact, and so quick to attract others’ scorn — despite the protagonists’ obvious righteousness! — that one begins to wonder whether this archetype is yet another incarnation of Mary Sue. I may raise hackles by saying that; let me say I agree with that link’s author when she counters that “sometimes, believe it or not, the best [Mary Sues] can wind up being lauded as legitimate characters and gathering fans beyond their original scope.”
It seems reasonable to expect this kind of response among the second and third and subsequent generations of science fiction writers, who spent their childhoods imagining themselves in the spaceboots of sci-fi heros and heroines. (This is perhaps even the mechanism by which science fiction replicates itself for survival: providing ever more homey and welcoming situations, however farfetched, for those of us who are smart and sensitive and alienated, and grow up to write them ourselves.) The entity model of intelligence is of a kind with IQ tests’ judgment of intelligence, and IQ tests are marked by the scientific positivism from which early science fiction arises.
A different model of intelligence in science fiction can be found in Alfred Bester’s book The Stars My Destination; let’s call this the Eliza Doolittle model, or maybe the Horatio Alger model. Bester’s protagonist begins as a convict locked away on a ship in the unreachable bowels of space, barely verbal, but motivated by revenge to better his situation. He gradually flowers into a more thoughtful individual, who, once again, develops superhuman powers of the mind. OK, I’ll grant you most of Bester’s portrayal of Gully Foyle is about his instinct or human will, but as the endpoint of this seems to lie in Foyle’s becoming a more “civilized” or rational person, the book seems to move towards intelligence, at least as we know it.
At first glance, The Diamond Age’s heroine, Nell, seems also to be little more than an Eliza Doolittle stand-in, with author Neal Stephenson standing in for Henry Higgins to civilize her. This was the point made to me by Michael Hart, head of Project Gutenberg, as we lounged around a hotel room the other day in truly extraordinary company after a day at the hacker conference. It was me, Hart — who was bearded, wearing a Panama hat, spandex bike shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt, and is not a lithe man — and two of the only people of color at the conference, Dominican brothers from the Bronx who worked day jobs in network administration. None of us had met each other before that day, and the meeting was impromptu; I never figured out how Hart met these guys. He’d buttonholed me into the conversation as I passed by saying “We were just talking about the Primer!” That’s a book which features prominently in The Diamond Age; he’d brought it up in his keynote address earlier, and I’d challenged him to do more with it afterwards. It turned out the brothers from the Bronx had never even heard of the book, so Hart apparently grabbed me out of the crowd for the hell of it.
Anyway, his POINT, the man had a point, some of us have points sometimes — Mr. Hart was at pains to highlight where The Diamond Age begins. It begins with Bud, he insisted. It begins with Nell’s father, who’s a punk and a petty crook and who meets an untimely end. Hart’s point was this transformation. Bud is where Nell starts, essentially in the gutter, with no resources and no safety and ultimately no shelter to protect her. And like an Alger hero, Nell rises through the ranks to become — again — society’s salvation. It’s a very heartwarming story, when you look at it that way. The tool which helps cultivate her capabilities is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an artificially-intelligent digital book which teaches her everything she needs to know.
But despite the clear Alger overtones of her trajectory, Nell’s story is not so simple. And this, as it turns out, is what attracted one of my favorite professors, Frank Moretti, to The Diamond Age. What he likes about it, he told me the other day, is that it’s about the nonlinearity of a single person’s educational path, all the parts which come together to make her a great leader. He likens the book to Rousseau’s Emile, and has even taught it in class a couple of times.
And Stephenson is explicit that it’s Nell’s path that makes her so brilliant, not just the book. The Primer’s creators come together to discuss why Nell is such a deep-thinking and resilient person compared to two other girls who received a copy of the book. They note the diversity of experiences Nell has had outside of her work with the book — something the other girls, cosseted away in a neo-Victorian setting — never got, and also the devotion of a woman who has been helping Nell learn through the book throughout her life.
It is this central theme which I think makes The Diamond Age an unusual book among other science fiction; no other sci-fi book I’ve read so far — of course I’m happy to be corrected, and I suspect Ender’s Game will do so shortly — takes such a clear (and actually, realistic) stand on the nature of intelligence, and makes it such a central part of the plot.
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