In science fiction we occasionally cast a wry and sardonic glance back at the idea among early science fiction readers and fans that science fiction people were somehow smarter than most people because science fiction addresses the big questions like why are we here?, is there life on other planets? , what is the true nature of reality?, etc. I've heard this referred to in conversation (accompanied by some eye-rolling) as "that whole fans are slans thing." (For the uninitiated, Slan (1941), by A. E. Van Vogt features superhuman slans living among normal humans.)

I was going to look up a few references to this in our research collection, but then I remembered David had already done that when he wrote the chapter ""I have a Cosmic Mind -- Now What Do I Do?'" in his book Age of Wonders (1984). (There is a revised edition issued by Tor about 10 years ago, by the 1984 edition is what I find on the shelf in our still partly-disassembled living room.)

A few select quotes, cited by David:

Robert A. Heinlein at the WorldCon in 1941:

Science fiction fans differ from most of the rest of the race by thinking in terms of racial magnitude -- not even in centuries, but in thousands of years . . . . Most human beings, and those who laugh at us for reading science fiction time-bind, make their plans, make their predictions, only within the limits of their own personal affairs. . . . In fact, most people, as compared with science fiction fans, have no conception that the culture they live in does change, that it can change.

Kurt Vonnegut responds via the character of Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965):

I love you sons of bitches . . . . You're all I ever read anymore. . . . You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limits. . . .

By now, a lot of us within sf have come around to the wry bemusement Vonnegut articulated at the idea that sf people are more intelligent than the rest of the human race because of their cosmic perspective.

So along comes Howard Gardner, a Harvard neuropsychologist, author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), a theory popular among educators, positing that there are many more kinds of intelligence than the rather narrow scholastically oriented abilities measured by IQ tests. In Frames of Mind, Gardner proposed that there were at least seven intelligences. In his 1999 book, Intelligence Reframed, he discusses a few more candidates. He adds naturalist intelligence to the list and gives serous consideration to the issue of adding something called existential intelligence:

Let me begin by proposing a core ability for a candidate existential intelligence: the capacity to locate oneself with respect to the furthest reaches of the cosmos -- the infinite and the infinitesimal -- and the related capacity to locate oneself with respect to such exisistential features of the human condition as the significance of life, the meaning of death, the ultimate fate of the physical and psychological worlds . . . (p. 60)

It does sound awfully familiar, doesn't it? Is Gardner validating 1940s fannish claims to intellectual superiority? Maybe there are ways in which people who read sf really are smarter than the rest of our species. Maybe fans really are slans.

I form no firm conclusions here, but I find the notion intriguing.