This vision of the super human is far from the vision of a "super hero", instead the novel explores how someone with such an evolutionary leap forward in intelligence and cognitive ability would view the human race and may consider themselves to exist outside of it. Upon finding a few others who are a little like him, john develops a plan - to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species, is the world ready for such a change? From birth to death we follow this extraordinary freak "John Wainwright", born to ordinary parents and so much more advanced than homo sapiens that they are little more than play things to him. Apart from the super human subject matter there are no other tropes of the genre present and this helps to re-enforce just how different John is. Written from a narrator's perspective, Odd John is a pretty unique piece of fiction. It's being reviewed here as part of Gollancz excellent SF Masterworks series. Odd John was first published in 1935 and was one of the very first novels to explore the theme of the super human, coining the term homo superior.
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