J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder is generally considered to be the first fictional treatment of superhuman intelligence, or “superintelligence.” This is a familiar trope for readers of science fiction today, but when the novel was originally published in 1911 it was anything but. What intellectual soil needed to be tilled before this idea could sprout?
At least since Plato, Western thought has clung to the idea of a Great Chain of Being, also known as the scala naturae, a system of classification in which plants rank below animals; humans rank above animals but below angels; and angels rank above humans but below God. There was no implied movement to this hierarchy; no one expected that plants would turn into animals given enough time, or that humans would turn into angels.
But by the 1800s, naturalists like Lamarck were questioning the assumption that species were immutable; they suggested that over time organisms actually grew more complex, with the human species as the pinnacle of the process. Darwin brought these speculations into public consciousness in 1859 with On the Origin of Species, and while he emphasized that evolution branches in many directions without any predetermined goal in mind, most people came to think of evolution as a linear progression.
Only then, I think, was it possible to conceive of humanity as a point on a line that could keep extending, to imagine something that would be more than human without being supernatural.
The Hampdenshire Wonder, in its final pages, is making an altogether different claim: The pursuit of knowledge itself is ultimately self-defeating.Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, was the first to suggest the idea that mental attributes like intelligence could be quantified. Galton published a volume called Hereditary Genius in 1869, and during the 1880s and ’90s he measured people’s reaction times as a way of gauging their mental ability, pioneering what we now call the field of psychometrics. By 1905, Alfred Binet had introduced a questionnaire to measure children’s intelligence; such questionnaires would evolve into IQ tests. The validity of psychometrics is quite controversial nowadays, as people disagree about what “intelligence” means and to what extent it can be measured. Some modern cognitive scientists do not consider the term intelligence particularly useful, instead preferring to use more specific terms like executive function, attentional control, or theory of mind. In the future “intelligence” may be regarded as a historical curiosity, like phlogiston, but until we develop a more precise vocabulary, we continue to use the term. Our contemporary notion of intelligence first gained currency around the time that Beresford was writing, and one can see how that converged with the idea of the superhuman in The Hampdenshire Wonder.
The titular character of The Hampdenshire Wonder is a boy named Victor Stott, but the unnamed journalist who serves as the novel’s narrator is initially intending to write a biography of the child’s father, “Ginger” Stott. Ginger is a famed cricket player, and readers will discover that a significant chunk of the novel is devoted to detailed accounts of his cricket matches. This is puzzling not just because cricket is baffling to casual observers but because it seems entirely irrelevant to the ostensible subject of the novel. While it remains a mystery as to why quite so many pages are spent on cricket, Ginger’s occupation begins to make sense when you realize that Beresford was an ardent admirer of H.G. Wells…whose father was an accomplished cricket player.
Beresford wrote a monograph about Wells in 1915, in which he notes that in the year before Wells was born, “his father took four wickets with consecutive balls and created a new record in the annals of cricket. The late Sir Francis Galton might have made something of this ancestry; I must confess that it is entirely beyond my powers.” Beresford seems to be interested in the idea that greatness comes from greatness. Rather than positing a direct connection between cricket and general intellectual ability, he suggests that habit is what constrains an individual’s potential. Ginger Stott resolves to raise a son without any habits so that he’ll be able to teach the boy to become an exceptional cricket player. As a result, Victor is born so free of constraints that he is a superhuman genius. The narrator theorizes that “The great restraining force in the evolution of man has been the restriction imposed by habit.” The logic underlying this assertion is unclear, but consider that, when praising Wells’ novella The Time Machine, Beresford writes of Wells that, “at the age of twenty-seven or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of conventional thought.” It’s almost as if Victor is an exaggerated version of Wells. One can imagine Beresford wondering, What might Wells have achieved if it hadn’t taken him twenty-seven years to free himself?
The narrator gives most of the credit for implementing Ginger’s plan to his wife, Ellen Mary Jakes, noting that “the exceptional man […] seems to inherit his magnificent powers through the female line.” Beresford seems to believe in the once-popular medical theory of maternal impression, the notion that a pregnant woman’s mental state influences the child she’s carrying; it’s Ellen’s commitment to avoiding habits, we’re led to understand, that is the proximate cause of Victor Stott being born with superhuman intelligence. Disappointingly, however, readers don’t get to hear much from Ellen Mary directly; she is praised for her intelligence, but given very few lines of dialogue. The unintellectual Ginger, by contrast, gets plenty. At this point in his career, was Beresford uncomfortable with letting his female characters speak for themselves? His 1913 novel A World of Women does much better in this regard.
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Victor is born with an enormous head but an ordinary body, which disappoints his athletic father but also points to certain assumptions we have about the relationship between the mental and the physical. Beresford could have made Victor both an athlete and a genius, but he opted instead to follow a trope perhaps originated by Wells: the idea that evolution is pushing humanity toward a giant-brained phenotype, which is itself implicitly premised on the idea that mental ability and physical ability are in opposition to one another. This has remained a common trope in science fiction, although there are occasional depictions of mental and physical ability going hand in hand. Edmond Hamilton’s 1931 story “The Man Who Evolved,” for example, has it both ways: the character Pollard undergoes artificially accelerated evolution, which initially improves him both physically and intellectually, but further evolution causes his body to atrophy as his brain expands. In John Taine’s Seeds of Life (1951), accelerated evolution not only turns the character Bork into a genius, but into a perfect physical specimen too. (Hilariously, this includes a dark complexion and coarse black hair, prompting Bork to rename himself DeSoto.)
If we take a detour into comic books, we discover that Victor’s trait of having a head too large for his body is most often found in villains; heroes typically display a more proportionate combination of physical and intellectual excellence. The pulp hero Doc Savage—who made his first appearance in 1933 and was one of the inspirations for the comic-book superhero genre—has trained both his mind and his body to near-superhuman levels. Batman is not only the world’s greatest detective but a world-class martial artist. Even Superman has on occasion been depicted as having a photographic memory and superintelligence along with his more familiar superpowers. For comic-book heroes, advanced mental powers are acceptable only because they are commensurate with the heroes’ physical abilities. An oversized head, however, serves as an indicator of imbalance—an unhealthy focus on the abstract that apparently leads antagonists away from the real world and towards villainhood.
The subsequent science fiction novel that is most clearly influenced by The Hampdenshire Wonder is Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John. Published in 1935, this is also the life story of a child born with superhuman intelligence as recounted by an unnamed journalist. In fact, Stapledon’s narrator explicitly refers to Victor Stott, not as a character in a story but as an actual historical figure—as if Odd John and The Hampdenshire Wonder take place in the same universe. It’s tempting to read Odd John as a deliberate response to Beresford’s novel, one that allows its protagonist, John, to avoid the pitfalls that befell Victor.
For example, the character who first appreciates Victor’s capabilities is the wealthy landowner Henry Challis, who offers the boy access to his considerable library. At one point he warns Victor, “whatever your wisdom, you have to live in a world of comparative ignorance, a world which cannot appreciate you, but which can and will fall back upon the compelling power of the savage—the resort to physical, brute force.” Victor does nothing with this information, which leads to his demise. Stapledon’s character John, however, encounters a bully during childhood and promptly learns how to fight. Similarly, Victor fails to recognize that a local clergyman, Crashaw, who considers him a dangerous heretic, is a threat; he makes no provisions for self-preservation, in keeping with the stereotype that highly intelligent people are prone to ignoring the world around them. By contrast, Stapledon’s character John is highly practical; for example, after interviewing an industrialist he decides that accruing wealth is the best means of gaining independence and power. By having John take such practical steps, Stapledon is able to continue his story of a superintelligent individual long enough to explore issues that Beresford cannot.
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At one point Challis asks his secretary, Lewes, for his opinion on Victor’s future. Lewes’s response is noteworthy:
“Oh! these infant prodigies, you know,” said Lewes with a large air of authority, “they all go the same way. Most of them die young, of course, the others develop into ordinary commonplace men rather under than over the normal ability. After all, it is what one would expect. Nature always maintains her average by some means or another. If a child like this with his abnormal memory were to go on developing, there would be no place for him in the world’s economy. The idea is inconceivable.”
There’s no reason to assume that Lewes is correct about Victor’s future development, but he is right about one thing: “The idea is inconceivable.” The challenge of imagining the actions of a superintelligent person has remained an issue throughout the history of science fiction. When Vernor Vinge submitted a story about such a character to Analog editor John W. Campbell in the 1960s, to name one example, Campbell rejected it with a note saying, “Sorry—you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.”
The first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.Beresford avoids the task of depicting the inconceivable by having Victor die before he can do much. (Although it’s not clear if Victor would have actually gone on to do anything, given how detached he seems.) This proved to be a common strategy in subsequent stories about superintelligent individuals: Both Pollard, in “The Man Who Evolved,” and De Soto, in Seeds of Life, die/devolve before they can act on their plans to conquer humankind. Stapledon’s Odd John departs from this strategy for a time, in that John discovers other superhumans who’ve preceded him but have had little impact on the world because they prefer to remain in hiding; this is a viable, if less interesting, route for depicting the actions of a superintelligent person. But eventually that novel also returns to convention: After John and his fellow superhumans form a community that the nations of the world consider a threat, they choose to die rather than fight the entire planet.
When superintelligence manifests as an individual, killing that character offers a solution to the narrative problem, but science fiction’s way of imagining superintelligence changed over time. In 1993 Vinge argued that progress in computer technology would inevitably lead to a machine form of superintelligence. He proposed the term “the singularity” to describe the date—in the next few decades—beyond which events would be impossible to imagine. Since then, the technological singularity has largely replaced biological superintelligence as a trope in science fiction. More than that, it has become a trope in the Silicon Valley tech industry, giving rise to a discourse that is positively eschatological in tone. Superintelligence lies on the other side of a conceptual event horizon. When considered as a purely fictional idea, it imposes a limit on the kind of narratives one can tell about it. But when you start imagining it as something that could exist in reality, it becomes an end to human narratives altogether.
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The Hampdenshire Wonder does posit a kind of eschatological scenario, but of a completely different order. After Victor’s downfall, Challis recounts the conclusion he came to after a conversation he’d had with the child, revealing a profound terror about the finiteness of knowledge:
“Don’t you see that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death.”
Stapledon makes a passing reference to something similar in Odd John, albeit on a smaller scale. At the age of five, John concludes his study of mathematics by saying, “There’s not much in number really. Of course, it’s marvelously pretty, but when you’ve done it all well, that’s that. I’ve finished number. I know all there is in that game. I want another. You can’t suck the same piece of sugar for ever.” This is a strong claim, but Beresford’s claim is much stronger: Every branch of knowledge will eventually be exhausted.
The idea that the search for understanding will inevitably lead to a kind of cognitive heat death is an interesting one. I don’t believe it and I doubt any scientist believes it, so it’s curious that Beresford—clearly an admirer of scientists—apparently did. Challis talks about the need for mysteries that elude explanation, which is a surprisingly anti-intellectual stance to find in a novel about superintelligence. While there is arguably a strain of anti-intellectualism in stories where superintelligent characters bring about their own downfall, those can just as easily be understood as warnings about hubris, a literary device employed as far back as the first recorded literature, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” But The Hampdenshire Wonder, in its final pages, is making an altogether different claim: The pursuit of knowledge itself is ultimately self-defeating.
Nowadays we associate the word “prodigy” with precocious children, but in centuries past the word was used to describe anything monstrous. Victor Stott clearly qualifies as a prodigy in the modern sense, but he qualifies in the older sense too: Not only does he frighten the ignorant and superstitious, he induces a profound terror in the educated and intellectual. Seen in this light, the first novel about superintelligence is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.
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The Hampdenshire Wonder by J.D. Beresford is available from MIT Press.
