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Strange Genius
Strange Genius: Classic Tales of the Human Mind at Work Including the Complete Novel the New Adam, the 'van Manderpootz' Stories And Others is a collection of stories about people whose minds are beyond the ordinary. Included is the hard to find novel The New Adam, a surprising tale of homo superior born among us, the first of a new human race, an evolutionary leap and a man whose mind is so different that he's an alien on his own planet. Also included are the humorous van Manderpootz stories about a scientific genius who wants everyone to know how great he is, and several more of Weinbaum's delightful tales of the human mind at work.
Hardcover
First published April 19, 2006
6 people want to read
About the author
Stanley G. Weinbaum
359 books71 followersFull name: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum.
"In his short career, Stanley G. Weinbaum revolutionized science fiction. We are still exploring the themes he gave us." —Poul Anderson
"Stanley G. Weinbaum's name deserves to rank with those of Wells and Heinlein—and no more than a handful of others—as among the great shapers of modern science fiction." —Frederik Pohl
"In his short career, Stanley G. Weinbaum revolutionized science fiction. We are still exploring the themes he gave us." —Poul Anderson
"Stanley G. Weinbaum's name deserves to rank with those of Wells and Heinlein—and no more than a handful of others—as among the great shapers of modern science fiction." —Frederik Pohl
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July 1, 2022
Being smart can be fun, but what's not fun is reminding everyone all the time how smart you are, unless you're a sociopath and that's how you amuse yourself. Sorry, pal, no one is impressed how fast you can derive special relativity using drink coasters and a dried up felt tip marker or gosh you just picked up that harpsichord and you can play it with the grace of an angel! How nice that everything comes easy for you.
Now what if you're so smart that not only is everything child's play to you, but you're so advanced that you might even start considering yourself the next level of humanity, or maybe even (gasp!) another species entirely. If people didn't love having their relative mediocrity rubbed in their faces at parties, they really aren't going to like when you refer to them as "the previous stage of evolution" or make dinosaur noises every time they walk past you. That behavior gets old fast!
Normally when this kind of thing happens you either wind up hooking up with a bald telepath in a wheelchair and his merry band of misfits or you become the kind of guy they fight all the time. But without them, let's face it, there's a risk you can become kind of a pill. Hate to be the one to break this to you.
Centering a long story around someone like that can be a bit of a challenge and its one that Weinbaum decided to take at some point in his life (the bibliographic information available suggests that the novel was published in 1939, several years after his death, but I don't know when it was written). That he even decided to tackle it is interesting as superhuman stories weren't super-common in conventional SF at the time . . . you had Philip Wylie's "Gladiator" in 1930 but that was more a precursor to the big red "S" himself (though its unclear whether Siegel and Shuster had even read the novel) and then his leap to superpowers was accomplished through chemical means. The greatest of the early super-person novels is probably Olaf Stapledon's "Odd John", published in 1935 and featuring Stapledon's typically cosmic look on things (mostly that the universe does not care because we are all dust in the winds of Time).
"The New Adam" is notable for some things, but let's just say its no "Odd John" (Stapledon was his own brand of genius and while he's not for everyone I don't think they was anyone even remotely operating along the same lines of what he was doing back then) . . . though Weinbaum is going to do his best to give you those "superior guy in the world of the normal" vibes. We basically go from birth to death of Edmond Hall, a weird baby that eventually grows up to be a weird young man and then a weird adult, with his advancement graded not so much on a curve but whatever line a rocket ship makes when it takes off. With his multi-jointed fingers he starts strange and proceeds merrily on that way, quickly realizing that he is not only like everyone else, he's basically Luke Wilson's character in "Idiocracy", where he's solving Fermat's Last Theorem for breakfast while everyone else is counting on their fingers . . . if they can remember where their fingers are. Needless to say, he's lonely. Fortunately he's smart, so maybe he can figure something out.
What follows is the journey of a man who tries literally everything in sight that was allowable by the standards of pulp SF of the 1930s. Poor Edmond is easily bored by almost everything, doesn't understand humor and talks to people as if they might vaporize at any moment from whatever mists they were conjured from. He's super-smart and super-depressed and even his pet monkey isn't enough to cheer him up. But we're along for the ride as a three dimensional man attempts to navigate a two dimensional world.
I'm not going to lie, some parts are a bit flat . . . ol' Eddie isn't the most dynamic of characters (he has a taste for laborious monologues when alone and lecturing everyone when he's not) and while the "new species of human just wants a friend" was a novelty of sorts for its time, a story where almost everything comes easily to the main character and he's still unhappy doesn't make for real pulse-pounding reading at times. We're either rooting for him to take over the world and remake it in his image or . . . become stupider? Rest assured, we're not in "Flowers for Algernon" territory.
Weinbaum does liven things up by including some actual people for Edmond to bounce off of, including two childhood acquaintances . . . Paul's the nominal bully who as an adult realizes he's in way over his head with Captain Smarty-pants, while Vanny is a swingin' single gal straight from the Thirties, holding her liquor and fascinated by Edmond's alien intelligence. Edmond finds himself equally fascinated by her. What could go wrong?
One hallucinatory detour into a surprise guest appearance by "The Black Flame" future later (I admire the Easter egg but boy did come out of left field) and you know. Before too long he's too much man for her and she's too much woman for him and they can't quit each other . . . these sequences are both the best and most harrowing portions of the novel where you finally get a sense of the effect that Edmond has an people. Watching him basically turn the girl's brain to mush just by the intensity of his smartness feels at times like something out of Lovecraft where Edmond is just a two legged version of the Creeping Chaos, sowing insanity in everyone he comes into contact with. And the sad part is he's barely trying to ruin everyone he meets, its almost like collateral damage from someone who was born into the world way too early.
The novel's pretty intense in those portions and it loses that intensity somewhat everytime it drifts from Vanny gradually cracking up (peak moment: yelling at a monkey's skull . . . though I guess we've all been there). The addition of a second representative of his new kind doesn't make things any less strange (get ready for the most intellectually dry sex scene ever written!) but you do start to get the sense that this is going to end either with Edmond taking over the world or a more final conclusion and to that end there may not be enough material to justify the page length (some padding was not an uncommon trait in this era . . . when you're paid by the word a guy's got to eat). By the time you get to "Edmond's Circle" and his philosophy of life you might start to feel that there's some wheel spinning in play, although the random poetry face-offs are kind of fun in a pretentious way.
But like any guy in fiction who's loved a lady a little too much Edward's eventually got to do the tragic thing and engineer his own ending . . . Weinbaum takes a while setting it up but when it comes its so abrupt that you're wondering if your copy of the book is missing a page. It fits, in a "I can't live at home in this world anymore" sort of way even if the deliberateness means a "just get on with it already" feeling start to creep it. Yet it feels complete, rare for a long work in this era of SF when a lot of longer tales were just linked events that kept vamping until the story was over or a certain page count was hit. Even with the uneven moments its impressive when taken as a whole since you do feel like you've experienced an arc in Edmond's life . . . the figure sitting in the chair by the end is not the quirky kid we started out with. He may bore or confuse or enrage everyone around him but he's definitely not uninteresting.
In any event, love or hate dear Edmond you're going to have to accept that you're not going to get anyone else like him for the rest of the collection. The next three stories feature the same two protagonists, the Van Manderpootz stories. Written in a more humorous tone they all have the same basic premise . . . Dixon Wells is a young man who works for his father's corporation. The first running joke is that he's always late for everything, even though it seems to work out in his favor (i.e. he doesn't die in plane crashes, so not exactly Gladstone Gander luck) though everyone does treat him like you'd treat slightly hapless dude who's always late . . . patronizingly.
But he does have a friend, the brilliant Professor Van Manderpootz, who is so brilliant he can't help but tell everyone that. He tends to come up with wacky inventions that actually do work and he's always willing to test them with poor Dixon. Each time the result is the same . . . young Mr Wells somehow encounters the woman of his dreams and then somehow she is snatched from his grasp, probably by being more attracted to punctual people. They're kind of fun stories, SF comfort food in a way and definitely not designed to be read all in row like how they're presented since beyond the nature of the inventions the stories hit the exact same note time and again (in a "whomp whomp" fashion). Once you've read one you can guess the broad strokes of the other two. How much that bothers you depends on your tolerance for going to the same well. Still, its nice to see a genius who isn't trying to take over the world.
The few remaining stories are just one-offs, with two notables. "The Brink of Infinity" is a fun mystery, where a mild mannered mathematician is imprisoned by a crazy old mathematician who gives him a certain number of questions to figure out what expression he's thinking of. Its "what number am I thinking of?" with higher stakes and done at gunpoint, but Weinbaum seems to come to the answer honestly but at least makes it seem like the protagonist earns it. Its probably the most satisfying story in here.
"Circle of Zero" is more interesting tom me in how it mixes the mundane with the fantastic. In the period just past the Great Depression Jack Anders is trying to keep his finances together while courting Yvonne. Things are a bit tight for her and her father as well but her father is into a thing called Morbid Psychology, which somehow seems to involve memory regression, though his version wants to go around the horn the long way . . . assuming that time is a circle they figure if they go back far enough they'll run into the solution to their money troubles by figuring out how they get out of it. Or something along those lines. It’s a bit of a crapshoot honestly but I guess it beats selling pencils.
But the characters are all likeable and you do find yourself rooting for their weird plan to succeed. I don't know how many SF stories there are that deal directly with the Depression (escapism was probably the word of the day) but people attempting strange science Hail Marys because the stock market has collapsed just isn't a common scenario in SF. There's a contemporariness to this story where the strains of having gone through an economic collapse are still evident (anyone who had a parent or grandparent go through that period can probably tell you the experience never really left them . . . my grandfather and his brother had to be temporarily put in an orphanage because his family couldn't afford to have them around) and so the desperation in the characters for this to work feels more . . . palpable? I don't know, of all the stories in the collection this one seems to hit a little closer to home for Weinbaum and underneath a certain light tone there's a definite melancholy, the question of "Will we ever stop being poor?" that even good old American optimism can't disguise. It also finishes on really bittersweet note, with the kind of spiralling home you sometimes have when you have a glimpse that maybe, maybe this world we know isn't everything and there's chance we'll all come together again someday in a different place and know each other again, in a landscape that's familiar and strange all at once.
All the stories in this collection have their moments (its probably front to back one of the stronger ones, unless you totally hate "The New Adam") so you get a good cross-section of what Weinbaum was capable of. But for me its "The Circle of Zero" where you really feel the loss of his early death, in the tacit acknowledgment that things can be bad now and you can hope for better later, but its not guaranteed and you might not get there without cost. And the cost that's paid might not ask your permission to pay it.
Now what if you're so smart that not only is everything child's play to you, but you're so advanced that you might even start considering yourself the next level of humanity, or maybe even (gasp!) another species entirely. If people didn't love having their relative mediocrity rubbed in their faces at parties, they really aren't going to like when you refer to them as "the previous stage of evolution" or make dinosaur noises every time they walk past you. That behavior gets old fast!
Normally when this kind of thing happens you either wind up hooking up with a bald telepath in a wheelchair and his merry band of misfits or you become the kind of guy they fight all the time. But without them, let's face it, there's a risk you can become kind of a pill. Hate to be the one to break this to you.
Centering a long story around someone like that can be a bit of a challenge and its one that Weinbaum decided to take at some point in his life (the bibliographic information available suggests that the novel was published in 1939, several years after his death, but I don't know when it was written). That he even decided to tackle it is interesting as superhuman stories weren't super-common in conventional SF at the time . . . you had Philip Wylie's "Gladiator" in 1930 but that was more a precursor to the big red "S" himself (though its unclear whether Siegel and Shuster had even read the novel) and then his leap to superpowers was accomplished through chemical means. The greatest of the early super-person novels is probably Olaf Stapledon's "Odd John", published in 1935 and featuring Stapledon's typically cosmic look on things (mostly that the universe does not care because we are all dust in the winds of Time).
"The New Adam" is notable for some things, but let's just say its no "Odd John" (Stapledon was his own brand of genius and while he's not for everyone I don't think they was anyone even remotely operating along the same lines of what he was doing back then) . . . though Weinbaum is going to do his best to give you those "superior guy in the world of the normal" vibes. We basically go from birth to death of Edmond Hall, a weird baby that eventually grows up to be a weird young man and then a weird adult, with his advancement graded not so much on a curve but whatever line a rocket ship makes when it takes off. With his multi-jointed fingers he starts strange and proceeds merrily on that way, quickly realizing that he is not only like everyone else, he's basically Luke Wilson's character in "Idiocracy", where he's solving Fermat's Last Theorem for breakfast while everyone else is counting on their fingers . . . if they can remember where their fingers are. Needless to say, he's lonely. Fortunately he's smart, so maybe he can figure something out.
What follows is the journey of a man who tries literally everything in sight that was allowable by the standards of pulp SF of the 1930s. Poor Edmond is easily bored by almost everything, doesn't understand humor and talks to people as if they might vaporize at any moment from whatever mists they were conjured from. He's super-smart and super-depressed and even his pet monkey isn't enough to cheer him up. But we're along for the ride as a three dimensional man attempts to navigate a two dimensional world.
I'm not going to lie, some parts are a bit flat . . . ol' Eddie isn't the most dynamic of characters (he has a taste for laborious monologues when alone and lecturing everyone when he's not) and while the "new species of human just wants a friend" was a novelty of sorts for its time, a story where almost everything comes easily to the main character and he's still unhappy doesn't make for real pulse-pounding reading at times. We're either rooting for him to take over the world and remake it in his image or . . . become stupider? Rest assured, we're not in "Flowers for Algernon" territory.
Weinbaum does liven things up by including some actual people for Edmond to bounce off of, including two childhood acquaintances . . . Paul's the nominal bully who as an adult realizes he's in way over his head with Captain Smarty-pants, while Vanny is a swingin' single gal straight from the Thirties, holding her liquor and fascinated by Edmond's alien intelligence. Edmond finds himself equally fascinated by her. What could go wrong?
One hallucinatory detour into a surprise guest appearance by "The Black Flame" future later (I admire the Easter egg but boy did come out of left field) and you know. Before too long he's too much man for her and she's too much woman for him and they can't quit each other . . . these sequences are both the best and most harrowing portions of the novel where you finally get a sense of the effect that Edmond has an people. Watching him basically turn the girl's brain to mush just by the intensity of his smartness feels at times like something out of Lovecraft where Edmond is just a two legged version of the Creeping Chaos, sowing insanity in everyone he comes into contact with. And the sad part is he's barely trying to ruin everyone he meets, its almost like collateral damage from someone who was born into the world way too early.
The novel's pretty intense in those portions and it loses that intensity somewhat everytime it drifts from Vanny gradually cracking up (peak moment: yelling at a monkey's skull . . . though I guess we've all been there). The addition of a second representative of his new kind doesn't make things any less strange (get ready for the most intellectually dry sex scene ever written!) but you do start to get the sense that this is going to end either with Edmond taking over the world or a more final conclusion and to that end there may not be enough material to justify the page length (some padding was not an uncommon trait in this era . . . when you're paid by the word a guy's got to eat). By the time you get to "Edmond's Circle" and his philosophy of life you might start to feel that there's some wheel spinning in play, although the random poetry face-offs are kind of fun in a pretentious way.
But like any guy in fiction who's loved a lady a little too much Edward's eventually got to do the tragic thing and engineer his own ending . . . Weinbaum takes a while setting it up but when it comes its so abrupt that you're wondering if your copy of the book is missing a page. It fits, in a "I can't live at home in this world anymore" sort of way even if the deliberateness means a "just get on with it already" feeling start to creep it. Yet it feels complete, rare for a long work in this era of SF when a lot of longer tales were just linked events that kept vamping until the story was over or a certain page count was hit. Even with the uneven moments its impressive when taken as a whole since you do feel like you've experienced an arc in Edmond's life . . . the figure sitting in the chair by the end is not the quirky kid we started out with. He may bore or confuse or enrage everyone around him but he's definitely not uninteresting.
In any event, love or hate dear Edmond you're going to have to accept that you're not going to get anyone else like him for the rest of the collection. The next three stories feature the same two protagonists, the Van Manderpootz stories. Written in a more humorous tone they all have the same basic premise . . . Dixon Wells is a young man who works for his father's corporation. The first running joke is that he's always late for everything, even though it seems to work out in his favor (i.e. he doesn't die in plane crashes, so not exactly Gladstone Gander luck) though everyone does treat him like you'd treat slightly hapless dude who's always late . . . patronizingly.
But he does have a friend, the brilliant Professor Van Manderpootz, who is so brilliant he can't help but tell everyone that. He tends to come up with wacky inventions that actually do work and he's always willing to test them with poor Dixon. Each time the result is the same . . . young Mr Wells somehow encounters the woman of his dreams and then somehow she is snatched from his grasp, probably by being more attracted to punctual people. They're kind of fun stories, SF comfort food in a way and definitely not designed to be read all in row like how they're presented since beyond the nature of the inventions the stories hit the exact same note time and again (in a "whomp whomp" fashion). Once you've read one you can guess the broad strokes of the other two. How much that bothers you depends on your tolerance for going to the same well. Still, its nice to see a genius who isn't trying to take over the world.
The few remaining stories are just one-offs, with two notables. "The Brink of Infinity" is a fun mystery, where a mild mannered mathematician is imprisoned by a crazy old mathematician who gives him a certain number of questions to figure out what expression he's thinking of. Its "what number am I thinking of?" with higher stakes and done at gunpoint, but Weinbaum seems to come to the answer honestly but at least makes it seem like the protagonist earns it. Its probably the most satisfying story in here.
"Circle of Zero" is more interesting tom me in how it mixes the mundane with the fantastic. In the period just past the Great Depression Jack Anders is trying to keep his finances together while courting Yvonne. Things are a bit tight for her and her father as well but her father is into a thing called Morbid Psychology, which somehow seems to involve memory regression, though his version wants to go around the horn the long way . . . assuming that time is a circle they figure if they go back far enough they'll run into the solution to their money troubles by figuring out how they get out of it. Or something along those lines. It’s a bit of a crapshoot honestly but I guess it beats selling pencils.
But the characters are all likeable and you do find yourself rooting for their weird plan to succeed. I don't know how many SF stories there are that deal directly with the Depression (escapism was probably the word of the day) but people attempting strange science Hail Marys because the stock market has collapsed just isn't a common scenario in SF. There's a contemporariness to this story where the strains of having gone through an economic collapse are still evident (anyone who had a parent or grandparent go through that period can probably tell you the experience never really left them . . . my grandfather and his brother had to be temporarily put in an orphanage because his family couldn't afford to have them around) and so the desperation in the characters for this to work feels more . . . palpable? I don't know, of all the stories in the collection this one seems to hit a little closer to home for Weinbaum and underneath a certain light tone there's a definite melancholy, the question of "Will we ever stop being poor?" that even good old American optimism can't disguise. It also finishes on really bittersweet note, with the kind of spiralling home you sometimes have when you have a glimpse that maybe, maybe this world we know isn't everything and there's chance we'll all come together again someday in a different place and know each other again, in a landscape that's familiar and strange all at once.
All the stories in this collection have their moments (its probably front to back one of the stronger ones, unless you totally hate "The New Adam") so you get a good cross-section of what Weinbaum was capable of. But for me its "The Circle of Zero" where you really feel the loss of his early death, in the tacit acknowledgment that things can be bad now and you can hope for better later, but its not guaranteed and you might not get there without cost. And the cost that's paid might not ask your permission to pay it.
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