Science! Week, Problematic Powers Edition: Super Intelligence

As I mentioned in my previous Problematic Powers post, this series is about the difficulties involved in writing for characters with various powers; it's not a "clever" attempt to point out the infeasability of a given power, because pretty much all of them are ridiculous. However, super intelligence is one of those ones that almost seems like it could exist in the real world.  We all know that guy who is far smarter than any of his peers, and we've all heard of kids graduating college at 16 with a doctorate in Things You'll Never Understand.  That's part of what makes a superhumanly intelligent character so hard to write.

Problematic Powers: Super Speed

Before I start, the Problematic Powers posts are not going to be "lol superhero physics don't work in the real world you guys." Thanks professor, I don't think we could have figured that out by the fact that there's, you know, no one in the world with superpowers. No, these powers are problematic in terms of story. The very thing that helps to make the character interesting and entertaining for the reader (besides all that "personality" and "drama" stuff) also makes them difficult to write. Near the top of the list, probably duking it out with telepathy, is super speed.