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Full Description
In this pioneering science-fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, a mutant wonder child s insights prove devastating. Science fiction luminary Ted Chiang introduces The Hampdenshire Wonder, one of the genre's first treatments of superhuman intelligence. Victor Stott is a large-headed supernormal mutated in the womb by his parents desire to have a child born without habits. Known as the Wonder, Victor surveys humankind s science, philosophy, history, literature, religion the best that has been thought and said and dismisses it brutally: So elementary inchoate a disjunctive patchwork. Rejecting the interposing and utterly false concepts of space and time, the Wonder claims that life itself is merely a disease of the ether. Unable to deal with the child's disenchanting insights, his adult interlocutors seek to silence him perhaps permanently. J.D. Beresford (1873 1947) was an English dramatist, journalist, and author. A great admirer of H.G. Wells, he published the first critical study of Wells's scientific romances in 1915. In addition to The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), an early and influential proto-sf novel about super-intelligence, his genre novels include A World of Women (1913), Revolution (1921), and The Riddle of the Tower (1944, with Esme Wynne-Tyson).
Contents
Series Foreword - Joshua Glenn
Introduction: "The Idea is Inconceivable" - Ted Chiang
Part 1: My Early Associations with Ginger Stott
1 The Motive
2 Notes for a Biography of Ginger Stott
3 The Disillusionment of Ginger Stott
Part 2: The Childhood of the Wonder
4 The Manner of his Birth
5 His Departure from Stoke-Underhill
6 His Father's Desertion
7 His Debt to Henry Challis
8 His First Visit to Challis Court
Interlude
Part 2 (Continued): The Wonder among Books
9 His Passage through the Prison of Knowledge
10 His Pastors and Masters
11 His Examination
12 Fugitive
Part 3: My Association with the Wonder
13 How I Went to Pym to Write a Book
14 The Incipience of my Subjection to the Wonder
15 The Progress and Relaxation of my Subjection
16 Release
17 Implications
Epilogue: The Uses of Mystery
