Let's have five stories, films, whatever in which someone or something experiences a temporary or permanent LOSS or INCREASE in intelligence. No more than one from any given author / universe, regardless of the genre. And no, computer upgrade manuals don't count...
The example is 2001: A Space Odyssey, where HAL 9000 is lobotomized by Dave Bowman pulling his memory.
Let's have five stories, films, whatever in which someone or something experiences a temporary or permanent LOSS or INCREASE in intelligence.
OK, I'll throw a bent three-cent bit into the hat. How does the "totally ordinary Joe" (whose name I forget) who gets suspended-animationed into the future in Idiocracy count? He doesn't experience any actual change in intelligence, but he also goes from being Mr Knut Outstanding to the Most Intellignet Man In the World (Sponsored by Gator Sweat Plant Food Inc)
I had a brief anticapitalist image of whole floors of Canary Mile and Whorf Street just vaporising when the density of Bankers/ Cubicle reached critical mass. Pleasant moment.
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Shooting aliens for fun and ... well, more fun.
"Speaking as an outsider, what do you think of the human race?" (John Cooper Clark - "I married a Space Alien")
Let's have five stories, films, whatever in which someone or something experiences a temporary or permanent LOSS or INCREASE in intelligence.
OK, I'll throw a bent three-cent bit into the hat. How does the "totally ordinary Joe" (whose name I forget) who gets suspended-animationed into the future in Idiocracy count? He doesn't experience any actual change in intelligence, but he also goes from being Mr Knut Outstanding to the Most Intellignet Man In the World (Sponsored by Gator Sweat Plant Food Inc)
That's a Cyril M. Kornbluth story, The Marching Morons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
based on some very dubious eugenics, in which the "hero" solves the "too many idiots" problem by creating a big lie of Venus being a paradise world and having them shipped there to die. It ends with the intelligent minority deciding he's too dangerous to live and putting him aboard one of the ships...
OK, that sort of qualifies, though it's not one of the ones I was expecting. Four more to go.
Star Trek the next generation the Nth Degree - the episode where Reginald Barclay gets hit with a pulse from an alien probe that temporarily makes him super inteligent
Arthur: OK. Leave this to me. I'm British. I know how to queue.
OR i could go with
Arthur Dent: I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.
or simply
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Right, let's have a list of five examples of SF stories - books, film, TV, short stories, etc. - that feature one or more preternaturally gifted children. One example only per author/universe.
"Gifted" in this context means anything from simple genius to uncanny powers/abilities. Because it's too common, I'm ruling out superheroes: no infant Clark Kent, no Kid Flash, etc.
"Gifted" in this context means anything from simple genius to uncanny powers/abilities. Because it's too common, I'm ruling out superheroes: no infant Clark Kent, no Kid Flash, etc.
There's a Star Bores film on at the moment, so can we carry out the frog-boiling experiment on the remarkably irritating Anakin Skywalker with more mitochondria than a scriptwriter can misspell and capable of being a virgin birth in a slave-holding free republic?
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Shooting aliens for fun and ... well, more fun.
"Speaking as an outsider, what do you think of the human race?" (John Cooper Clark - "I married a Space Alien")
Alia Atreides, Anakin Skywalker, and a whole clutch of Midwich Cuckoos are all good answers (and The Midwich Cuckoos removes two other John Wyndham possibilities - The Chrysalids and Chocky - from the available pile).
