james_nicoll

As in, it turns out the Sexy Sixteenth-Century Vampire Stud living next door is actually none-too-bright by modern standards?

This bit (from the Wikipedia article) could have interesting implications, as well:

"In the United Kingdom , a study by Flynn (2009) found that tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. For the upper half of the results the performance was even worse. Average IQ scores declined by six points. However, children aged between five and 10 saw their IQs increase by up to half a point a year over the three decades. Flynn argues that the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having "stagnated" or even dumbed down. He also states that the youth culture is more oriented towards [sic] computer games than towards of [sic] reading and holding conversations. Researcher Richard House, commenting on the study, also mentions the computer culture diminishing reading books as well as a tendency towards teaching to the test."

Ah, my favorite junk science. Stuff that purports to show how Kids of Today have been receiving Dumbed Down Culture and Can't Think Their Way Out of a Paper Bag.

junk science is junk.

Well, the "time traveler" in BEYOND THIS HORIZON turns out to be totally outclassed . . .

How would you count "The Marching Morons"?

That's one of the really interesting thing about that book - it's a book about eugenics where the "genetically inferior" are supported by society, a book with a superior breed of humans in which one of the example inferiors is an upper-class conservative white America, and a book in which (by implication) "an armed society is a polite society" only works because the people are already saner, smarter and faster reacting than current humans.

I am now imagining the sexy, sexy vampire in his sexy, sexy ancien régime garb having the Mary Sue love interest patiently explaining to him how to check his e-mail. And it amuses me greatly.

That distant demented laughter you're hearing is actually just me.

That was allegedly going to be one of things Stephanie Meyer's Midnight Sun requal series was going to explore, specifically Bella's tendency to express her love for Edward by sneaking up and creepily watching over his shoulder in complete silence as he vainly tried to log into his gmail account.

"The new guy who has any idea how computers work" was a common suggested archetype in Vampire: The Masquerade, I know.

Not the Flynn Effect, but IIRC Saberhagen's Dracula musing on how he was regarded as tall in his breathing days but in the modern day his height is average; if he lives for another few centuries, he figures he'll be a dwarf.

Kim Newman touches on this, too.

Hrrm. Remind me some time to write up the abandoned vampire plot-line from "Halting State" (abandoned before I decided to make the book a straight near-future SF novel). One of the aspects was that vamps who survived more than a century became such ossified creatures of habit that the 1914-45 period wiped out 98% of them in Europe. (Survival behaviours circa 1841 might well be dangerous by 1941; anonymity strategies that worked against clueless pre-industrial-revolution agrarian types would fail drastically in the face of Hollerith tabulators and modern bureaucracies.)

Verne Domingo and Jason Wood had to touch on that too; Verne was finding that modern society made the old "die and replace yourself" trick increasingly difficult-to-impossible to pull off.

One thing about supernatural horror is that most of the traditional baddies of the genre would, in general, fare poorly against a modern Weberized nation state. And addressing it with, "Mumble mumble they, um, have the corrupt government in their pockets" seems to be a fairly weak sort of handwave.

(For all of his flaws as a writer, one thing I enjoy about Lumley is the way that he mixes vampires and nation states).

A bit off-topic, but I recall a very short (couple pages) first-person story told from viewpoint of a vampire who works a suicide help line. That's how he finds victims whom nobody will miss. Rather creepy.

... I really didn't need this idea planted in my head.

Thank you for the link-- lots of good stuff there.

I wrote something along those lines, but it's sitting on my hard drive, unsubmitted.

Hi, it's me, replying with another one of those "I know I read this somewhere but have no idea but still want to pretend to be contributing."

I don't have my Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines anymore, but in about the mid-1990s, there was a humorous short story (not an urban fantasy) in one about a vampire who just could not get the hang of modern conveniences. He was eventually defeated by someone who just pulled out his fangs and let him go on his merry way, because I guess vampires can't figure out how to use ice picks in lieu of fangs or something.

The Johnny Depp version of Dark Shadows seems like it might be a little bit of what you're looking for, though perhaps it's just that hipster pastiche stuff that some people in Hollywood think is still popular.

Not that I know of, but I am now thinking about Heinlein and laughing my head off.

Actually that's what broke my SoD in "Time Enough For Love" -- people never learn They make exact same mistakes century after century. Except exceptional individuals like Lazarus Long; in fact his own Howard descendants who are themselves centuries old, are somehow ignorant of everything that happened before their birth and must rely on Lazarus' wisdom.