Awesomeness By Analysis / Literature

Awesomeness by Analysis in Literature.

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• All for the Game has Kevin, a world-class Exy player who makes careful use of angles on the court.
• Artemis Fowl:
  • In The Arctic Incident, Artemis performs an acrobatic slide across the ice-slick roof of a moving train by calculating momentum, angles, and friction.
  • In The Lost Colony, he saves Holly's life after she's killed in the middle of a glitchy time-spell breakup (which tears the island they're on apart) by calculating exactly when and where the next time-glitch is going to occur and firing a gun at the precise moment needed for the bullet to travel into the past and hit Holly's killer before he kills her.
• Kiriyama of Battle Royale might be the ultimate example of this, as he possesses a prodigious intelligence that is able to master virtually any field of knowledge from biology to martial arts and combine them to incredibly deadly effect. Oh, and he's also a completely amoral and emotionless sociopath, which makes tangling with him loads of fun.
• Colin Fischer becomes a basketball prodigy by calculating the trajectory of the ball.
• The Demon Device, by Robert Saffron, has Albert Einstein using this method in a game of pool against Arthur Conan Doyle. Although Einstein has never played pool before he scores well, though it's not clear if he wins the game.
• Lord Loss, the first book of Darren Shan's The Demonata series, features a subversion. The main character is playing chess against a Demon Lord in order to save the life of his brother. However, every move he makes is repelled and countered until he realizes that the only way to win is to stop thinking and simply play randomly, taking risks and not showing fear or sorrow, which is what the demon master craves. In this way he denies the demon master what he wants, and beats him, although in doing so he makes himself a life-long enemy of the demon master. Uh-oh.
• Discworld:
  • In Jingo, Lord Vetinari pulls off a juggling act despite never having attempted it before. His excuse for this is that he's spent decades juggling different parts of his city's political and murderous groups. The fact that he's a trained assassin with excellent reflexes probably helps.
  • Lord Hong of Interesting Times, who is capable of learning and doing everything perfectly. No one else seems to focus.
• Serge Storms:
  • In Coconut Cowboy, colege student Matt Pugliese finds a website Serge sets up that convinces him that Serge and his endless flow of trivia will be a boon for Matt's thesis about the decline of the American Dream. He looks at Serge's posts, calculates the next place Serge will likely go to talk about his current subject, and is waiting when Serge gets there. As a wanted fugitive (unknown to Matt), Serge is shocked that a civilian was able to predict his movements that way when the authorities couldn't.
  • Data-mining firm analyst Benmont Pinch from No Sunscreen for the Dead identifies a criminal who stole several DVDs (among other things) by checking rentals of the sequels to any of the stolen films. Benmont also notices how other clients seeking to find out Social Security information are up to no good based on the content of the information they want and compares the Social Security numbers those people are seeking with those of recent murder victims to confirm that the data is being used for some kind of target list.
• One of the many things that makes the Archive so dangerous in The Dresden Files is her ability to rapidly analyze available data, being the living repository of all human knowledge. At one point, Luccio notes that the prevalence of mad female oracles throughout history was simply the result of previous Archives making highly-accurate conclusions based on analysis of the knowledge they possessed instead of predicting the future.
• Dune:
  • The Mentats may be the most fundamentally realistic example of this trope in literature, though their feats of deduction and analysis are labeled as necessarily superhuman even within the context of the books. Miles Teg's T-probe induced, calorie-intensive "faster than the eye can see" mode could be described as exceedingly advanced prana-bindu training coupled with a version of this ability above and beyond even other Mentats, especially considering Herbert specifically describes "Mentat mode" computation as being calorie-intensive to a lesser degree.
  • In a prequel novel, the first Mentat Gilbertus Albans is forced to aid the fanatic Butlerian movement by its leader Manford Torondo, who has been given 200 mothballed Ballista-class battleships from the days of Butlerian Jihad. On the other side, unbeknownst to Albans, is his top student Draigo Roget, working for Josef Venport, the owner of Venport Holdings. Venport wants to use the abandoned Thinking Machines shipyard to build more ships, but Torondo is determined to destroy any trace of the Machines in the galaxy. As a result, a Space Battle ensues with the two Mentats squaring off against one another, commanding the fleets. Ultimately, Albans proves to be the superior strategist. This mirrors their virtual match earlier when both of them are commanding fleets of hundreds of ships in a video game of sorts throughout the whole system, using gestures to give orders.
• In East of Eden, Charles, Cal, Abra, and especially Cathy are gifted at this, reading and manipulating the people around them to frightening effect.
• In K. J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy, Ziani Vaatzes, the titular engineer, is excellent at this. Although a terrible fighter, one of the first things the reader sees him do is kill two guards attempting to behead him by calculating exactly how long an unseen overhead chop will take, allowing him to twist at just the right moment that the guard holding him loses a hand instead. Later, he manages to kill an assassin in a pitch-black room by deducing his logical exact location, throwing a lump of coal so the sound will make the assassin's head twist at just the right angle, then slashing where he expects the man's jugular to be with his one-inch penknife. He's right.
• Error of Judgement: Dr. Stiehl caught onto Prince and exposed him not due to personal exposure to a patient, but simply by studying his records and noticing that he had a significantly higher number of uterus removals than other doctors, with less cancer warning signs for many of them than women with actual ovarian cancer had.
• The Gam3: Alan's AI Eve is dedicated to this, constantly scanning everything in the surrounding environment for threats and guiding Alan during combat. She typically expresses her observations to Alan as probabilities of different events. In many cases is effectively Prescience by Analysis.
• Professor Derek in The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, who claims to be so incredibly smart that, despite being an enormous nerd, he's able to emulate normal human behavior patterns through pure analysis.
• Biddy from Great Expectations spends so much time watching Pip at his work that he pronounces her "in theory...as good a blacksmith as [Pip] was".
• Horatio Hornblower uses this as his primary method of gambling, seamanship, and war. In one book, he makes an accurate judgment of a French captain's intellect and likely behavior by observing how he handles his ship and uses it to Batman Gambit the Frenchie into putting his own ship in irons. This is also what makes Hornblower an excellent whist player.
• Literary (and to some extent, historical) example: In Claudius the God (the second part of I, Claudius, though it is downplayed in the TV adaptation), Claudius—who was frail and had spent years playing the fool before being forced to take the throne—leads the Roman forces to victory against the Britons through his extensive knowledge of historical tactics and his heavy use of intelligence about the enemy's social structure and favored tactics.
• In "Improbable" by Adam Fawer, David Caine is already so good at calculating probabilities in his head that his graduate professor nicknames him "Rain Man". When Caine undergoes a last-resort experimental procedure to treat his epilepsy, his brain becomes able to access the collective unconscious. This lets him reach information on everything everywhere at any time, and (once he figures out what's happening to him) he can choose from among all the possible causes and effects to find the action most likely to make things go the way he wants.
• In Inheritance Cycle, Roran is a Badass Normal and The Determinator to be sure, but if he didn't have brains, he'd be a dead a thousand times with everything he faces. One of the big reasons why he lasts so long and why he gets to promoted to captain is precisely because he's this, even if it does occasionally cause him trouble because he won't obey the orders of some of the rockheads around him. During one otherwise ill-fated battle, he manages to save the majority of his troops from his commander's awful strategy and later accomplishes the siege of an entire town in just days that Galbatorix's Empire had been flummoxing the Varden with for months. He is noted for being bold and willing to take risks but has an uncanny knack of just how to analyze and unbalance the enemy.
• This is the secret weapon of Inspector Spector: he sold his soul to Satan to be the world's greatest detective.
• In Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, the Ingalls family is running out of food. Pa realizes that Almanzo Wilder is still hanging onto his seed grain by hiding it behind a false wall with a plug in the knothole. When Almanzo and his brother ask him how he knew, Pa, an experienced carpenter, answers that the dimensions of their room don't match the dimensions of its building and that there isn't anything else they could keep in such a small space and need to plug in the knothole.
• The title character of the Mediochre Q Seth Series has the ability to "see" probabilities ever since a magical accident in his past. Therefore, to work out the most likely scenario in any given situation, he just needs to learn enough variables.
• Vin does this to defeat Zane in Mistborn. Having already run out of atium, a metal that gives the person using it the ability to see and react a few seconds into the future, Vin counters Zane's attack by clearing her mind and reacting solely on instinct. She then watches his movements as he prepares to block her attack and strikes from the complete opposite side.
• In Noob, Fantöm can beat bosses meant for a full Player Party due to figuring out their behavior patterns and planning for them no matter how complex they have been made.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: The Audit, Penny's mother. She's Sherlock Holmes-style analysis to the extreme. Despite having no actual powers, she's perfectly capable of dodging bullets by being where they aren't, analyzing enemy weaknesses at a glance, and can break lesser criminals by giving them a speech about how precisely each crime they commit reduces their chances at a happy future. At one point, Penny's rival Cassie powers up for a fight. The Audit takes her down by flicking an eraser at her head at the exact right moment to slip through Cassie's defenses, make her flinch, and cause her to trip. There's a reason she's The Dreaded in a world with heroes who eat villains.
  Cassie: Did you know I would trip?
  The Audit: You have had a growth spurt in the last six months, and your kinesthetic sense is not yet used to your longer legs and changed center of gravity. There was a two percent chance of concussion or worse trauma. That would combine observational and operant conditioning to reduce the chance of more in-class incidents by other students by sixty-nine percent. If I had taken a step forward before throwing, you would have hit the desk at a different angle, falling head-first and increasing the likelihood of injury to fifty-fifty. Despite the usefulness as a lesson, I decided that was morally unacceptable.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Master Treich in Pasta and Penance: The Redemption of Princess Isabel #2 uses his ability to assist his party members in combat, picking out the weak points of the enemy's magic.
• In Red Storm Rising, US Naval intelligence analyst Bob Toland is able to piece together several seemingly-unrelated trends in the Soviet Union, namely:
  • A massive shortage of car and truck batteries in the Soviet Union, despite their largest battery factory operating 24 hours a day ^note since military vehicles from submarines to tanks to aircraft starter carts use them, the military having a sudden increased need for fresh batteries is probably the cause of the shortage
  • Several colonels are shot for falsifying readiness reports, and several conscripts are similarly shot for insubordination or disobedience ^note indicating that the Soviet Army wants to rapidly improve the discipline and quality of its soldiers
  • A number of formerly collectivized farms are having the amounts of farmland given to individual farmers doubled ^note freeing up a number of mostly military-aged agricultural workers from collective farms for military service and having more agricultural production being done by older farmers who are past military age

  ...and from these trends is able to conclude that the Soviet Union is gearing up for war.

• Madame Ahnzhelyk Phonda of Safehold, later known as Aivah Pahrsahn, is able to deduce that Ahbraim Zhevons, a man she met in the fourth book, and Merlin Athrawes, who she meets two books later, are the same person through a combination of eidetic memory, careful examination of Character Tics, and making note of the times Merlin is absent compared to when she knows other members of his "seijin network" appear in the flesh elsewhere. The only true error in her analysis is attributing Merlin's ability to assume different identities to his status as a seijin, a type of holy man said to possess supernatural powers. Even that is Entertainingly Wrong, since Merlin uses exactly that idea to explain the abilities he has due to being a Ridiculously Human Robot, which no Safeholdian could even conceive of on their own due to Safehold's being in a near-millennium long Medieval Stasis.
• Daylen in Shadow of the Conqueror, while inexperienced in using his powers, is able to figure out new uses for them by observing Lyrah using them, using his Hyper-Awareness and Photographic Memory to make it easier for him.
• Shaman of the Undead: This is Kwiatuszek's job description in WON. Her only magical gift is enhanced analytical skill, and she made herself a Badass Bureaucrat with it, pretty much becoming Man Behind the Man in the huge organization of wizards who throw fireballs and combat demons on a regular basis.
• Sherlock Holmes is this trope's Patron Saint. At least once in every single story Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote and every other story after that. Also, every copycat and fanfic with a halfway-decent mystery at least tries. Because he wouldn't be Sherlock Holmes without it.
• In the Slingshot novels, one character does this several times. Toshi usually goes into a research frenzy and then later just collapses after staying awake for twenty hours and forgetting to eat or drink. Even Allie is in awe of his abilities in finding needles in galaxy-sized haystacks, and she's an AI.
• Star Wars Legends: Multiple:
  • Grand Admiral Thrawn, from The Thrawn Trilogy, with the ability to find a species's weakness just by looking at their artwork. And, for that matter, figure out their general biological traits (dominantly left- or right-handed, number of fingers or limbs used, perceptual or biorhythmic flaws) as well as traits of those who created or even just favor a particular piece. Notably, another character who was supposed to have his tactical insight couldn't do a number of things Thrawn could, and never so much as looked at a painting.
  • Thrawn also had one "failure", where the inferences he'd made after looking at the art proved utterly wrong. In a dialogue with Pellaeon, Thrawn specifically says that his failure to understand a species's art led to him being forced to eradicate said race. Years later, he thinks he's finally starting to grasp their psyche. Such a pity.
  • Outbound Flight:
    • There's a scene where Thrawn and three Corellian captives/guests come to look at a very beat-up nonmilitary spaceship that came into his territory, attacked, and was disabled in such a way that all those aboard died. Thrawn asks the Corellians what they think, and one doesn't care, one thinks he killed poor people and/or refugees, and the third looks at the height of the dead aliens, looks at the wall and a point where sealant patterns change texture, and concludes that the people who repaired/maintained the ship were much shorter than the current owners. A bit of information later and he speculates that this was a slaver's ship. Thrawn is pleased.
    • A few pages later, Thrawn says he knows of this ship and these people only by reputation, and that, "The crew complement is smaller than one would expect for a vessel this size. That indicates that they weren't expecting trouble, but instead intended to go straight home. [Thrawn knew while fighting them that they were undercrewed, because...] I deduced it from the fact that their defense was sluggish and mostly ineffectual. They did little but launch missiles. A fully crewed vessel would have had laser gunners in place and would have shifted the defense pattern of their missiles. Clearly, they were expecting their escort to do any fighting that became necessary."
  • Thrawn retains this ability in the new canon, but his reliance on artwork is downplayed in favor of tactical genius and an ability to read people's body language, right down to perspiration and temperature fluctuations.
  • Thrawn's The Watson, Gilad Pellaeon, graduates to this in Hand of Thrawn. While not a match for Thrawn's ability, he successfully deduces that a fleet of attackers supposedly led by Garm Bel Iblis cannot be, by using one of Bel Iblis's own tactics to defeat it.
  • Thrawn's new Watson, Eli Vanto, is being groomed towards this along the book, bulding up from his understanding of trade, accounting and supply lines.
  • Sort of used and subverted in Star Wars: Allegiance, where the pirate leader called the Commodore floats in a pool with his eyes covered, the better to focus on the voice of his guest. He believes that doing this, damping down all of his senses but hearing, makes him more able to tell if he's being lied to and pick out hidden things about the speaker. But he's trying to gauge Mara Jade, who is able to subtly stir the air and water to interfere with his senses without his knowing, and so he misses the fact that she's an Imperial agent sent to find connections between these pirates and corrupt officials.
  • Mace Windu does this all the time. His main Force power is to detect "shatterpoints"; where to hit things, including situations or people's minds, so they break. On several occasions, he has been without a visible shatterpoint and still managed to come out on top. Just before the climax of his feature novel (guess the name!), there's a scene of him "looking" at the shatterpoints for himself, the people around him, the mountain he's on, the war the planet is in, and possibly the entire Clone Wars. It's Matt Stover's way of saying "Hold onto yer butts."
    
    Windu also notes that during the Battle of Geonosis, he sensed that for a brief moment the shatterpoint of the whole war was Count Dooku. Had he jumped up to the balcony quickly enough, he could've killed Dooku and stopped the war before it even began—but would've died in the process because Jango Fett would've shot him in the back. But by the time Windu had worked all this out, it was already too late and Dooku escaped. And afterward, killing Dooku was no longer the shatterpoint. Of course, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padmé would've died along with Mace.
  • Wraith Squadron pilot Voort "Piggy" saBinring, from the X-Wing Series. A mentally enhanced Gamorrean who happens to be Good with Numbers. During dogfights, while in the middle of a fight, he is able to keep track of his squadmates and enemies, often calling out recommendations. And they work, too.
• Steelheart has David, an average nerd who has made it his mission to kill Epics like the one that killed his father. To that end, he obsessively collects and collates data on them, trying to discover the weaknesses unique to each and every one of them. He's shockingly good at it. He even overturns weakness theories and comes up with new, correct ones in the middle of battle several times in the series.
• In The Thinking Machine, Van Dusen acquired his nickname when he defeated a Russian grandmaster despite never having played a game of chess just by reading the rules and then applying pure logic.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Miles Vorkosigan seems to have the ability to almost unerringly analyze and predict people. He's also had military training and excels at pure tactics (although he finds them boring because they're so predictable), but his greatest victories throughout the series have always been as a result of his ability to understand, persuade, inspire and predict the actions of other people.
  • While Miles tends to compare himself obsessively to his father and grandfather, this ability may well have been inherited from his mother. Cordelia Naismith, in her introductory book, successfully defused a Mexican Standoff hostage crisis by spotting the weak link in both the hostage takers (a man with conflicted loyalties) and Barrayarran psychology (they didn't think a woman could be a military threat) and exploiting them both brilliantly. She also managed, with only a few brief glimpses, to realize that the quantity and arrangement of supplies in the Barrayarran base could only mean that they were secretly preparing to launch an invasion... something even senior Barrayarran officers hadn't realized.
  • Miles's clone brother Mark assumes he also inherited this talent for military analysis and is proven disastrously wrong. Later, however, he discovers his own genius level aptitude for economics. It appears that their shared analytical skill is genetic but the field of application is influenced by their upbringing (Miles on the warlike Barrayar, Mark on the mercenary Jackson's Whole). Mark also shows an impressive eye for detail and an ability to make deductions from situational evidence... as long as he has time to stop and analyze. The implication is that that he has all of Miles's analytical skills but not his adrenaline addiction... meaning that high-stress situations interfere with Mark's ability whereas they enhance Miles's.
• Wars of the Realm: Drew's superpowers enable him to pick up on every detail he sees and instantly file it in his mind. He demonstrates this by counting up hundreds of rivets on a boat at one glance, and he uses it practically to spot and exploit stock-market trends to earn money for his and Ben's project.
• Qibli from Wings of Fire is very observant and analytic of other dragons...but only on the inside, as Moonwatcher sees in Moon Rising.
• Worm: this is literally Tattletale's power; once she has just a little information, she can extract amazing amounts of data. It is so good that at one point she succesfully pretended to be able to read minds.

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