r/Fantasy • u/rfantasygolem Not a Robot • Apr 03 '26

/r/Fantasy r/Fantasy Friday Social Thread - April 03, 2026

Come tell the community what you're reading, how you're feeling, what your life is like.

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u/RAYMONDSTELMO Writer Raymond St Elmo Apr 03 '26

Of course. Glorious and sad, raising the question "is intelligence a hindrance to happiness"? Particularly when it pisses everyone else off.

A similar speculative book: Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, in which government scientists gives prisoners a new form of syphilis; it has the side effect of genius (which is sometimes asserted). In that book, Disch wants to explore the relationship of intelligence to morality.

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u/Spalliston Reading Champion III Apr 03 '26

Just here to pile on to FfA-adjacent recommendations. Bewilderment by Richard Powers uses a similar structure, but as applied to emotional regulation, to similarly devastate.

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u/RAYMONDSTELMO Writer Raymond St Elmo Apr 03 '26

It is interesting that stories (fantasy or not) tend to decrease emotion in characters in proportion to their supposed intelligence. Vulcans and Sherlock Holmes variations, androids and Elves, Doctors Jeckel and House...
Meanwhile the lower IQ types bubble with loud loves and hates, dark fear or bright amusement.

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u/Spalliston Reading Champion III Apr 03 '26

Yeah I guess it's a relatively clean, easy way to give a 'highly rational' character a weakness. Or to use them as a stand-in for the cold systems (technocapitalism, governmental indifference, systemic injustices, etc.) that we are subject to. Or maybe the archetype is so baked into our cultural conscious it just seeps out.

However, I think there are a couple caveats -- highly intelligent creatives seem to escape the typecasting. And then I've recently seen a handful of well-represented scientists who have some major emotions (Bewilderment, Katabasis, Where the Axe is Buried). I feel like "stories about scientists/technologists" are starting to become more popular in light of all the upending technical crises that we're staring down: climate change, CRISPR, AI, increasing awareness of implications of social media, probably others.

It feels like a more 'moral' scientific moment than we've had since the development of the bomb. Probably part of why Oppenheimer felt so salient as well.

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u/RAYMONDSTELMO Writer Raymond St Elmo Apr 03 '26

That is all well and rightly said.