Snakes on Moraine?
Snake Ice ?
They then copied an old idea, he was originally Dr. Science. 
Have him do the things real-life smart people do: listen more than they talk, and observe what they see. Real-life smart people pay attention. That’s pretty easy to depict in prose fiction.
I know a guy who’s pretty scary; he’s one of those lucky guys who is good with names. He remembers everyone he’s been introduced to at a party. People often remark to him, “Oh, you remembered!” as if it’s vastly surprising. Alas, for most of us, it would be.
And a genius isn’t a genius in everything: I’m the Goddess of Contingency Planning and was, as you say, astonished to discover that other people don’t see all those what-ifs I see (I’d always assumed that They Knew Better and disregarded those items as unimportant or improbable), but ask me to do any accounting and my answer will be “you know what? That’s what accountants are for, let’s call one!”
IMHO it is worth answering “what is the point of view?” What is the point of view of the narrator about the genius, what is the point of view of other characters to the genius, what is the point of view of the genius to other characters, and finally what is the authors point of view of the genius? Answering these questions will help create a specific character - one who also happens to be a genius.
The indicator here would not be rushing through, but in taking graduate level classes as an undergrad, and also establishing a research relationship with a professor. Every undergrad at MIT these days does research, so it is possible.
Also it is a great place to justify how the character picked up odd bits of knowledge. My daughter took cuneiform in college for fun. It hasn’t been useful so far, but who knows?
I took 7 years for mine, but that was only because my adviser died and I switched schools, and passed two sets of quals and two sets of orals. And took time off to teach one semester. I could have easily done it in five years if I stayed in one place and was in a hurry. Classes in grad school don’t take that long, and with a nice RAship or fellowship you can do research while taking them. And if you start writing papers right away, you can have enough for a dissertation quite early. Mine was fairly big, my daughter’s, which was mostly stuff she did already, was quite short. And if our genius makes a big important discovery he or she will get a PhD right away as universities bid for his services.
Yeah, the Professor who knows everything about everything doesn’t really exist. Plus a genius is often so focused that he or she doesn’t give a crap about “unimportant” things.
That’s why do many people use a non-genius as the viewpoint character. If you accept the challenge of using the genius as the viewpoint character, then you need to show others reacting to his or her work. “I dashed off the paper over the weekend, it got into Science two months later.”
The point is that to a genius it isn’t hard. I naturally remember stuff. The Jeopardy test, when I took it, was 50 questions. I got at least 48 right (they don’t give you a score, but I know it.) It was easier than many tests I took in college. Locals took it every 6 weeks or so, and it was hard for them, but it was no big deal to me.
You see what I mean?
I was on the board of a GATE parents support committee, and the district GATE specialist often spoke to us. Truly gifted people (IQ well over 140) have certain psychological quirks. You might want to research this and add some of these to the mix. But you don 't want The Big Bang Theory over the top quirks.
I think I’d take the subtle approach, and maybe make your genius seem like a normal person, except that they “get” things faster and more completely than the other characters- like maybe have them jump ahead a consequence or two when discussing something, so that he doesn’t quite seem like he’s thinking the same thoughts, even though he is.
That’s how a real genius probably works in real life, based on the smartest people I’ve known, probably some of which probably do count as “geniuses”.
The trick is that all people, no matter how intelligent, have some socio-emotional drive behind their actions. Ender is a genius boy, but he’s more concerned about fitting in than he is about becoming a master military strategist. Miles Vorkosigan is a manipulative mastermind, but he’s driven by his need to prove himself in a world that despises the physically disabled. In both cases, these individuals use their genius in service of their heart’s greatest desire. And it is emotional conflict that is the stuff of good fiction.
Don’t have the genius be able to pull statistics out of thin air. He’s not Google. Grissom does this all the time in CSI.
Don’t have the genius able to operate complicated machinery after reading the manual the night before. NCIS LA had an episode where Callan pretended to be a counterfeiter by reading manuals of a bunch of high-end printing presses and then being taken to a press hidden in a warehouse. Uh-uh. It doesn’t work that way, even if you can memorize the names of all the parts. I used to run printing presses. It takes weeks of training and trial and error to be able to run a one-color press, much less a four-color. Then it takes years to get to the point where you can handle complex multicolor jobs like money. Furthermore, saying “you have to pour the ink so it fills all the grooves” does not sound like you know what you’re talking about.
Don’t have the genius able to tell an award in a glass and frame is bogus because he can deduce by sight alone that the paper isn’t the proper weight. In the first place, there’s no rule that awards are only printed on a certain weight of paper. I’ve printed awards on paper weights from 24# to 90# bond. In the second place, no one can tell the weight of a single page of paper behind glass by sight alone unless they had microscopic vision. I’M TALKING TO YOU, WRITERS OF ELEMENTARY!
Let’s break down what geniuses do, at a fundamental level:
- They observe things that other people do not.
- They retain information that other people do not. (Or they are better able to access and correlate retained information.)
- They have insights that other people do not.
- They reach conclusions more quickly than other people, given equivalent or better information.
All of this boils down to information handling: acquiring it, retaining it, and connecting pieces of it. Often, as other posters have pointed out, geniuses display these traits in connection with their specialty, and not so much outside it. However, they do suggest some ways to show genius in action.
The simplest to demonstrate is probably (4). It doesn’t require specialized knowledge or insight on the part of the author. You just have to spend more time thinking about something than the genius: you think through the implications for an hour, and the genius states your conclusion and chain of thought immediately. Thinking through multiple scenarios, starting from different assumptions, may help. A quickly spoken stream of consciousness style can work for this, possibly supplemented by rapidly scribbled notes and diagrams.
(1) and (2) are the stuff of the classic Sherlock scan. Holmes retains a tremendous amount of knowledge concerning obscure minutiae–which the author can provide via careful research for realistic works or make up from whole cloth otherwise. Encyclopedic knowledge is a big pitfall when writing a genius, though; many of the things Holmes “knew” were, frankly, pretty silly.
Observation (without being gratuitously Sherlockian) is trickier. Geniuses are generally good at spotting patterns, and also at quickly deducing a cause from an observed effect. A genius might, for example, watch a computer log scroll past too quickly to read, but still notice that something wrong or unusual happened–not because they are reading the log, but because something broke its pattern. Scrolling back up, they find that a section is missing. Or they might notice a change in light level in an adjacent room, and deduce that some piece of equipment that draws a great deal of current has turned on or off. Geniuses spend a lot of time asking themselves “Why?”, consciously or subconsciously, about a lot of things (many of them ultimately irrelevant).
Insight (3) may be the hardest to portray, if you want to do it from the perspective of the genius. In the case of a major insight, it’s not always clear where the solution comes from. It just is, independent of any obvious pattern or chain of logic. If asked about it, the genius might speak of it in vague or metaphorical terms: “I smell X in that data”, for example. Alternatively, they might spend time backtracking, trying to reconstruct the logic supporting the idea. An external perspective gives you an out: When someone asks your genius how they know X, they can just shrug and admit that they can’t explain it–but if someone checks, they will find that X is true. Neither of these are stunts you want to overuse, though. They tend to come across as “cheating”, which is frustrating for readers.
Even at that, they’re not superhuman. I mean, if you were to meet Michael Phelps and not know who he was, you’d probably think he was mostly really tall. Similarly, if you met Michael Jordan, you might think he’s tall and sort of athletic looking. Wayne Gretzsky wouldn’t probably stand out much at all, even in his prime.
You’re NOT liable to think “Best swimmer/basketball player/hockey player EVER” unless you see them in their element for an extended period of time. Not every play those guys made was mystically awesome (some were, for sure) but in total, they were spectacularly better than their counterparts.
I suspect a genius of their caliber would be similar- if in academia, maybe a few really highly regarded papers/books, and a sense that this guy is quicker on the uptake than your average bear, but nothing Sheldon Cooper-esque or like the idiot savants in “Scorpion”.
Well, not always. The thing about really smart people is that they’re* always thinking*. They don’t just float through life like the rest of us; those gears are always grinding away. They could be thinking about whatever’s in front of them, but on the other hand, their minds can be off on wild tangents, making connections nobody else is making - hence the whole “absent-minded professor” stereotype. In rare cases, they can be doing both at the same time.
My advisor used to say that the dual curse of being a theoretical physicist is that first, you’re always working, because whenever you’re thinking, you’re working. And second, nobody can ever tell when you’re working.
I’d boil it down to: from experience, or not at all.
Unlike being a fireman or an astronaut or even a call girl, where the experiences can be transmitted through good biographical work, I don’t think the difference being much smarter than most of the population is understandable by any but those on the same level. So you can fumble around and read books by real smart people and try to emulate that viewpoint, but I think it will end up on the same level as something written from children’s books about firemen and astronauts and… uh… call girls.
Well, even people who aren’t strictly geniuses have some experience with getting some concept or skill much more easily than other people. Most people have talent of some kind, some thing they just ‘‘get.’’ I think we can build on that experience.
You’ve heard that old canard ‘‘write what you know’’ and I always interpreted to mean, ‘‘If you’re a lawyer, write about law’’ and would inevitably conclude, ‘nobody wants to hear about grant writing!’
But now that I write more intentionally, this phrase has taken on a much broader meaning to me. I ‘‘know’’ relationships and how people’s motivations shape their actions, so that’s what I write about. Some people ‘‘know’’ loneliness. Even when you’re facing writing about something you don’t strictly know, you can find the thing you do know about it, and write it from your angle of knowing. For example, I don’t ‘‘know’’ military life but I do know trauma. I do know being driven by a central cause. I do know sacrifice. I might have to do research to fill in all the blanks, but starting from what you know gives you an authentic jumping off point. It also gets at the universality of human experience which is so critical thematically.
Likewise, even if you don’t have direct experience with being a genius, you can take what you know – what it’s like to have a skill that comes easily to you – and extrapolate from there.
Watch TV shows such as Scorpion, Elementary, Big Bang Theory for their portrayal of “genius” characters.
Do the opposite.
Sorry I didn’t come back earlier, folks. Some very good advice! I will let you know how it goes.