List of 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
About the author
J.D. Beresford (1873–1947) was an English dramatist, journalist, and author. His proto-science fiction novels include The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), A World of Women (1913), and The Riddle of the Tower (1944, with Esme Wynne-Tyson); he also wrote in the horror and ghost story genres. A great admirer of H.G. Wells, he wrote the first critical study of Wells in 1915. His daughter, Elisabeth Beresford (1926–2010), was creator of the literary and TV franchise The Wombles.
Summary
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.
