Oh shit! I just read an omnibus of John W Campbell cause I'm a freak for Carpenter's The Thing.
What I couldn't get past was that EVERY. STORY. in his collection has a single, brilliant, genius man (always man) defeat an unbeatable monster/empire/alien armada/whathaveyou with the invention of some superweapon or gambit (MacReady and the blood test) or even occasionally headslappingly obvious tactics. (Bad guys are given bulletproof shields so bury them in rockslides)
I was like wowwwww this is so nakedly 1950s atomic age/A-bomb/Galt pilled but given that a lot of great stuff had happened, in some cases due to one guy or a small team (Salk, the Curies, Einstein) and WWII had been ended (in the American propaganda that totally ignored the Soviets and Japan's willingness to surrender) by the SuperWeapon of the A-bomb. So in a sense excuseable.
I did NOT know that he grabbed the levers of power and made sure to mint out more dreck like he created. I guess he wasn't like, the most obvious practitioner of that style of scifi, hes a writer with a distinctively bad and hackneyed personal who *forced it* into a genre.
But yea. All problems are soluble by a single smart genius acting in concert with no one else or directing a faceless mob whose deaths don't count. Does that sound like you? Good news, it sounds like themselves to literally anyone!
Hah, yea they nail literally every point I mentioned. Guess this wasn't a new revelation but to be fair I'm not a big scifi guy.
I kinda fell off once I got through adolescence and realized how much of the genre is a special little boy no one believes in (harry potter, ender, Luke Skywalker) from nowhere special who has a magical destiny that makes him so much better than everyone else... you get it.
It's wish fulfillment for sad lonely kids (Which, hey I used to be an SF fan, not gonna act like I wasn't a sad lonely kid). Anyway, is there a taxonomy?
Where's the line between an unathletic nerdlinger imagining being discovered for having great hidden talent and going on adventures and a mundane adult with no particular skills imagining being a super competent worldbeating genius?
Also, one niggle, I'm not talking Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court type stuff which seems to be the focus of the piece you linked, but specifically a guy of that context and milieu who is just smarter and better than everyone sround him. Usually set in the future, but in Who Goes There it's just an extra smart 1950s scientist in a base full of 1950s scientists.
Oh shit! I just read an omnibus of John W Campbell cause I'm a freak for Carpenter's The Thing.
What I couldn't get past was that EVERY. STORY. in his collection has a single, brilliant, genius man (always man) defeat an unbeatable monster/empire/alien armada/whathaveyou with the invention of some superweapon or gambit (MacReady and the blood test) or even occasionally headslappingly obvious tactics. (Bad guys are given bulletproof shields so bury them in rockslides)
I was like wowwwww this is so nakedly 1950s atomic age/A-bomb/Galt pilled but given that a lot of great stuff had happened, in some cases due to one guy or a small team (Salk, the Curies, Einstein) and WWII had been ended (in the American propaganda that totally ignored the Soviets and Japan's willingness to surrender) by the SuperWeapon of the A-bomb. So in a sense excuseable.
I did NOT know that he grabbed the levers of power and made sure to mint out more dreck like he created. I guess he wasn't like, the most obvious practitioner of that style of scifi, hes a writer with a distinctively bad and hackneyed personal who *forced it* into a genre.
But yea. All problems are soluble by a single smart genius acting in concert with no one else or directing a faceless mob whose deaths don't count. Does that sound like you? Good news, it sounds like themselves to literally anyone!
Yeah, Nevala-Lee talks about this theme in sci-fi of that era, calling it the myth of the “competent man”: https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/the-myth-of-the-competent-man/
Hah, yea they nail literally every point I mentioned. Guess this wasn't a new revelation but to be fair I'm not a big scifi guy.
I kinda fell off once I got through adolescence and realized how much of the genre is a special little boy no one believes in (harry potter, ender, Luke Skywalker) from nowhere special who has a magical destiny that makes him so much better than everyone else... you get it.
It's wish fulfillment for sad lonely kids (Which, hey I used to be an SF fan, not gonna act like I wasn't a sad lonely kid). Anyway, is there a taxonomy?
Where's the line between an unathletic nerdlinger imagining being discovered for having great hidden talent and going on adventures and a mundane adult with no particular skills imagining being a super competent worldbeating genius?
Also, one niggle, I'm not talking Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court type stuff which seems to be the focus of the piece you linked, but specifically a guy of that context and milieu who is just smarter and better than everyone sround him. Usually set in the future, but in Who Goes There it's just an extra smart 1950s scientist in a base full of 1950s scientists.
The trope isn't particular to SFF.