Achievements In Ignorance / Literature

Achievements in Ignorance in Literature

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• In German, an achievement made in ignorance of the inherent dangers is frequently called a "Ritt über den Bodensee" (a ride across Lake Constance). This is based on a folk legend that was turned into a ballad by Gustav Schwab, Der Reiter und der Bodensee (The Rider and Lake Constance): In a cold winter, a rider loses his way in a snowstorm and without realizing it rides across the frozen-over Lake Constance. This is something a sane person would normally not attempt because due to the size of the lake^note Germany's largest, with a surface area of 536 square km and the Rhine running through it you could not be sure that it would be safe for a rider and horse to cross all the way. It does not end well though — when he is told that he has arrived in a village on the other shore, the shock of realization of the danger he unwittingly had gone through kills him.
• Alcatraz Series:
  • Smedry Talents often have a subtext of this. Generally, the Smedrys can turn being very bad at one thing (for example, dancing), into being really good at something else (like fighting). Aydee Ecks Smedry's power in particular is being extraordinarily bad at math, so that she can, for example, believe that if you have one each of the three kinds of exploding teddy bear (It Makes Sense in Context), then that's six teddy bears total, making 3 extra appear.
  • Alcatraz was raised in the Hushlands, making Free Kingdomer magic and technology equally arcane to him. Since he is more skeptical about common axioms (technology is defined as something anyone can use and magic is restricted to certain people), he can make connections nobody else can, like Smedry Talents are the same as Lenses.
• Baccano! has Isaac and Miria presented with needing to keep people out of a museum for a while. After concluding they can't steal the entire building, they decide that, if they steal the door, nobody can get in. So they steal the door. Which causes the police to shut down the museum to investigate the stolen door, meaning this actually worked.
• The Belgariad:
  • This is played seriously when Garion tries to resurrect the dead colt and succeeds, something Belgarath (the first and at that point, most powerful human sorcerer) can't do. In this case, it's primarily used to show just how much sorcery depends on the sorcerer believing a feat is possible. Sorcery is pretty much defined by how people think, meaning that each sorcerer can do things that other sorcerers find extremely difficult, because of the way they think - this is just the logical extreme. However, it's implied that the Light Prophecy gave him a bit of help, and serves as Foreshadowing of how ridiculously powerful Garion really is. In particular, the adolescent Garion sees things as simpler than they actually are, which lets him do things that his learned elders think are too complex to be done. Belgarath notes at one point that this also puts Garion at risk, as this sometimes results in Garion attempting things that more experienced sorcerers would know are too dangerous to try. This is also Foreshadowing, as Errand, a complete innocent, convinces the gods to bring Durnik back to life in the last book largely by not comprehending he's dead...largely.
  • Later, Garion does it again, creating "Adara's Rose" for his cousin Adara to make her feel better. It mostly just appears to be a slightly lopsided flower with a pleasant scent. In the sequel series, it turns out to be the panacea, the cure for all ills, with its very smell capable of curing an otherwise incurable poison. The revelation that Garion created it offhand (he mostly just seems a little embarrassed at how wimpy the flowers are) leaves Cyradis dumbstruck for the one and only time in the series.
  • Also subverted in the fifth book, Enchanter's Endgame, by Queen Islena of Cherek when ruling in her husband's stead. Following suggestions of a fellow queen, she orders a priest trying to usurp power to go to the front lines or be sent to the dungeons. Such an ultimatum would be completely unacceptable behavior for the monarch, except Islena isn't well known for her intellect and is assumed to be ignorant of her apparent faux pas. Unable to counter the queen's order, his take-over not yet ready, and with no actual legal grounds to protest, the priest is sent to war. And once the priest is there with the rest of the army, he really can't come up with a compelling reason why he should be sent home again. Especially since members of his radical sect claim to be fearsome warriors who aren't afraid of battle. Her husband King Anheg later admits that he could never have done this because he is expected to know better.
  • Also, in Polgara the Sorceress, Polgara comments on Belgarath's ability to continue at any given task unrelentingly, and supposes he may be able to "store up sleep" during his long periods of rest, something that as the team medic, she knows/believes to be impossible. Just afterward, she decides it might be interesting to test the capacity of a human to do what seems impossible - when one doesn't know it—by convincing Mandorallen to pick himself up by the scruff of his neck.
• In Mickey Zucker Reichert's Bifrost Guardians series, there is a magical fortress that is so well protected by various traps that, as everyone knows, it is impossible to break into. When the main characters need to do just that, one of them leaps to the challenge, saying that he's been doing "impossible" things all his life and he's not about to stop now. As it turns out, the magic protecting the fortress gets stronger the more you believe in its effectiveness—all you have to do to get in is to believe that you really can do the impossible.
• The main character of Bofuri: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense., a VRMMORPG novel, hasn't played any game before. So she started putting all the skill points of her character in defense. But she acquired very rare and powerful abilities that make use of her defense, like gaining additional resistance or outright nullifying all the damage she receives.
• In The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, the titular cat Pixel does exactly that because he's too young to know it's impossible.
• Circle of Magic:
  • The books run on this trope, particularly the four main characters weaving their powers together in the first book. Lampshaded when Niko informs Tris that the magic-seeing spell should have worn off a week after it was placed.
    Niko: There's an advantage to instructing young mages: suggestion counts for so much with you four.
  • At the same time, though, it is noted by various characters that magic (much like science in the real world) has many things still unknown about it. You just don't realize this is so until the so-called impossible happens. This is multiplied by the fact the main characters have natural ambient magic, which comes from an affinity to various crafts or elements, whose rules are more or less adherent as to the individual subject matter, as opposed to the learned university magic which is highly structured by it's schooled rules.
• Jim Butcher's Codex Alera:
  • The city folk say that the people on the frontier have such strong magic because they don't know that they shouldn't. More precisely, the frontier-dwellers tend to have "Furies" that are strong, but partially-independent and hard to control; the inhabitants of the central provinces have much better control, most at the cost of raw power (the nobility are the major exception). Achievements in Ignorance is theorized as the reason for this, but it's never definite; it could also be that wild untamed furies on the frontier are naturally stronger, or living on the frontier hones people's skills in ways that soft city life does not.
  • It's also specifically stated that doubt and uncertainty and frustration can inhibit furycrafting. At one point, a character across the ocean from Alera has a minor panic attack on suddenly remembering that theorists have asserted that furycraft is impossible on foreign shores, only to be reassured that another character has just accomplished several feats of furycraft (partly due to being too hard-pressed to remember it was theoretically impossible), and gets ordered to forget the theory.
• In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, there is this:
  "The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot."
• David Langford's "Different Kinds of Darkness" is about a group of school children who find a BLIT image on paper and make an endurance game out of staring at it. Later, an actual terrorist strike using a stronger BLIT is stopped when one of the children is able to withstand the BLIT long enough to tear it down and throw it in the trash. The school staff realize that misusing the weaker one had given them a tolerance for BLIT images, something that hadn't been considered possible.
• Done in Dinoverse with the help of a Sentient Cosmic Force. Bertram builds a machine for the Science Fair which has a simple function—play different randomized videos on screens while hooked up to suction cups on someone's head—but he wants people to think it's showing their dreams, so he builds something massive out of junk salvaged from tech shops. Somehow it turns into a Time Machine. Later it's shown that throughout the multiverse people have been building devices that do the same thing, and Betram must repair a broken one without tools while in the body of a Dilophosaur.
• This was a theme of Douglas Adams' works. For instance, in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a major part of the plot revolves around a computer programmer attempting to understand why there is a sofa lodged in his staircase, which was moved up there by a pair of removal men, twisted around in every possible angle, and declared irrevocably stuck. The programmer creates a computer simulation, which determines that it isn't possible for the sofa to have been stuck up there in the first place at all. He assumes his program is wrong but begins to wonder if he may have discovered a whole new branch of physics. This was based on an exaggeration of a real thing that happened to Douglas Adams while he was at university, but the story does have an explanation given later on. Time Travel caused a door to appear in the wall where there wasn't one before, and the people behind it were nice enough to open the door so the mover could get by. When the door vanished, there was no longer any way for it to go back the way it came.
  • For that matter, it's exemplified by the line from Life, the Universe and Everything, "There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
• Discworld likes this one:
  • Tiffany Aching reading the dictionary cover to cover because nobody ever told her she shouldn't and Susan Sto-Helit successfully teaching seven-year-olds algebra and, when told it's too hard for them, replies that so far they haven't figured that out. It needs to be said that examples of children learning something before adults would think they're ready to learn it are probably Truth in Television. A bright child may be reading books meant for adults by the age of eight or ten, though they probably won't understand everything they read.
  • Bergholt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson is such an incompetent architect and inventor that he ends up creating buildings that are Bigger on the Inside, and circles with the value of pi equal to exactly 3. Three of the national projects that he undertook can fit in a normal pocket. The full list is here.
  • In Equal Rites, Esk teleports something without a counterweight and was able to do it because she didn't know it was impossible because she hadn't been formally taught. It does, however, have consequences later. As well as a possible explanation being given: any wizard could do that, but doing so greatly increases the chances of something going very, very wrong in transit, leading to wizards who know better never trying it.
  • Discussed in The Last Hero, when Leonard asks for journeymen craftsmen, rather than masters, because he has no use for "people who have learned the limits of the possible".
  • Death gives this explanation for how he can move through walls and otherwise tell the laws of physics to sit down and shut the hell up. His advice to Mort in his stint as his apprentice is not to think about it too hard and forget that you know that you can't move through walls. Mort is able to do this when he isn't actively thinking about it as he escapes a group of thugs by backing through a wall. Later books implied that this is because of Death's nature as being outside time - even if the wall is there now, there was or will be a time when the wall will not be or wasn't there, so Death instinctively travels through the space the wall occupies at a moment when there wasn't a wall, then reverts to the moment he needed to be in. When time gets imprisoned in Thief of Time, both he and Susan temporarily lose the ability to do this, as the world is frozen in a moment and there is no past or future to travel through.
  • Susan also uses this trope when she travels back through time to ask Death a few questions about her job. The Raven uses this trope as an example of why education is actually a bad thing.
  • An interesting example is Lord Rust, Ankh-Morpork's foremost military leader by dint of heritage; the man is a total incompetent with absolutely no tactical ability or military knowledge whatever and does not seem to comprehend the utter futility of attacking a vastly superior force on their home ground with virtually no provisions. While this has the obvious result of killing almost every man under his command, Rust is completely unharmed, even though he leads every suicidal charge from the front. By all laws of probability, he should be dead long ago. However, Rust has the unusual ability of being able to completely and subconsciously ignore anything that contradicts or is outside his extraordinarily unrealistic worldview, assuming that it simply cannot exist, including physical danger. He has been reported as charging directly at enemy lines surrounded by projectiles without being scratched; arrows have apparently changed direction to avoid him (which then hit his men). On the Discworld, sufficiently powerful belief can alter physical reality, and magic has been described as more or less ignoring the laws of physics.
  • Hodgesaaargh finds the newly-hatched phoenix because nobody told him that nobody had ever found one. A slight subversion in that the other characters think that it is this trope, whereas Hodgesaaargh also succeeds because he thinks of the phoenix first as a bird, then as a magical creature while everyone else thinks of it the other way round.
  • Cohen and his Silver Horde slaughter the Agatean ninjas because nobody told them that ninjas were invincible. They have a history of doing stuff like this. As Barbarian Heroes, they regularly do impossible things, kill impossible things, survive impossible things, and, in general, are impossible. There is a reason they have all lived to be very, very, very old and still haven't retired. In fact, that last one counts as the biggest impossibility they regularly pull off: even after they died, they didn't think they were dead and went on like it didn't happen.
  • In Sourcery, the Genie uses this to travel through the sky in the lamp while Nijel is also holding it. The trick is not to draw too much attention to it (by thinking or talking about it) so that physics doesn't catch up with its impossibility.
  • In Going Postal, at the end of the initiation trial that the old postmen run for Moist, they sic several massive dogs upon him, whom he recognizes from their bark as Lipwigzer dogs—which his grandfather raised. He handles the challenge with perfect confidence by using the commands that all purebred Lipwigzers are trained... only to learn afterward that they were not Lipwigzers at all, but Ankh-Morpork junkyard dogs, with no Lipwig training whatsoever. Since he thought he was safe, they couldn't smell fear on him.
  • Raising Steam has the steam train "Iron Girder" essentially fly across a rickety bridge, supported only by mist and fog, because Moist convinces Simnel that it can (which turns out to be a subversion, because Moist has secretly made a temporary living ... or whatever ... bridge out of the Ankh-Morpork golems that the mist and fog prevent anyone from seeing).
  • The Light Fantastic: Exaggerated with the Druids' method of assembling stone circles: convincing the 50-tonne megaliths that they can fly and then riding them to the construction site before they can remember that they are, in fact, giant hunks of rock.
• Discussed and invoked in The Dresden Files. While setting up a Batman Gambit, Harry compares himself several times to Wile E. Coyote. When things start exploding in his face, he thinks to himself that Wile E.'s big mistake is looking down. If he kept running, he'd make it to the other side of the canyon. While Harry isn't technically ignorant of the dangers around him, he decides to keep going anyway.
• In Dykstras War, the titular supergenius develops an entirely new branch of physics, and his basic theorems are only successfully challenged and updated by one person. He had seen some data indicating that under certain conditions, there was no theoretical barrier to accelerating to faster-than-light speeds, but Dykstra dismissed that because that simply made no sense and the laws of physics wouldn't allow for it, and the discovery was left to an autistic savant who didn't filter his data like that. It turns out that FTL is indeed possible.
• In Earth's Children novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, the narration states almost verbatim that Ayla could only come up with her two-stone trick because no one told her it was impossible to rapid-fire two stones from a sling.
• The entire premise behind the victory over the Buggers in Ender's Game. Ender was lead to believe that the entire war he fought was just a simulation meant to train him for the actual war. This was done to push him past the Moral Event Horizon and force him to use tactics that would otherwise be unthinkable against a real opponent: total xenocide. Once it's revealed what he did, he broke down into hysteria, stating he never would have done it if he knew it was real.
• Everfound gives us an odd variation combined with Reality Warper. The ruler of the City of Souls is sometimes known as "The Unremembering King" due to his ability to "unremember things". How this works is if the king says he does not remember something, then it ceases to exist. For example, he doesn't remember that Afterlights with red hair aren't parrots, so they sprout red parrot wings. He doesn't remember not being a powerful Mayan king, so he becomes one. As he fell toward the center of the earth, he tried to save himself by not remembering there ever being a direction such as "down"—so he was teleported instantly to the only place where there is, in effect, no "down"—the center of the earth.
• Played with in the third book of Ewilans Quest, to explain how Matthieu/Akiro could teleport somewhere he had never been, which no one seems to have achieved before and was thus believed to be impossible.
• Humans in the Expeditionary Force series are at the very bottom of the technological totem pole and are absolutely helpless against the full might of the hostile species inhabiting the galaxy. Despite that, there are two reasons why they still have a distinct advantage over everyone else: 1.) All technology in the galaxy is based on how each species think reversed-engineered Precursor technology is supposed to work while the main character has befriended a Precursor A.I. who is the only one in the galaxy who knows how Precursor technology is actually supposed to work and 2.) Human scientific and technological knowledge is so laughably ignorant in the grand scheme of things that the main character keeps pointing out workable solutions and coming up with plans that succeed because he doesn't have the knowledge to "know" that such feats were supposed to be impossible. The flabbergasted and begrudging A.I. even comments that this trope must be humanity's hat.
• In the book Fallen Angels, the main character Perry is charged with setting up claymores to provide suppressing fire in a sneak attack on some Vietcong soldiers. Just before the firefight begins, another character sees a Vietnamese soldier sneak out and turn one of the claymores around, but the gunfire starts before he can do anything about it. However, once the fight ends, they realize that none of the claymores fired in their direction. In other words, Perry had set up that particular claymore backward, and the enemy had turned it around again. Especially impressive, given that claymores are labelled This Side Forward.
• In Glory Road Oscar Gordon, knowing nothing of hypergeometry, somehow manages to feed Igli to himself, thereby killing the unkillable construct.
• The Blieder Drive of Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion was invented in this manner. Blieder was trying to invent a magic trick, but he had no idea what he was doing and ended up launching a penny through the roof of his house at what later turned out to be many times the speed of light.
• In The Great Train Robbery, the last part of Edward Pierce's plan to get to the gold requires him to climb along the top of a speeding train, and the revelation that he successfully did so causes an uproar in the courtroom. Although he spouts some poorly understood science about a slipstream preventing him from falling off, actual experts dismiss this as nonsense and decide that the only way he got away with it is because he had no idea it should have killed him.
• In Good Omens, this seems to basically be Newton Pulsifer's superpower. Once, he tried to create a little useless circuit because it was advertised that "If turning the ON switch does nothing, it's working". When Newt turns on the circuit, he's inadvertently built a radio that picks up Radio Moscow.
• Heralds of Valdemar:
  • Used seriously with the Valdemarans, who not only are able to come up with magical solutions no one has tried before because they aren't familiar with the cultures and traditions surrounding magic, but are also able to analyze it according to logical rules because no one has told them that magic doesn't follow rules, leading to one of the Hawkbrothers' bewildered muttering "But magic doesn't work that way!"
  • Said Hawkbrother eventually buckles in and starts learning Magic A Is Magic A, though he struggles with it. Going from perceiving himself as a master artist with magic to a bridgebuilder with math and calculations isn't easy for him.
• Issei routinely attempts to pull stunts like this in High School D×D, with varying degrees of success. A shining example comes in his first showdown with Vali, where he grabs a fragment of Vali's Divine Diving armor and declares he'll incorporate it into his Boosted Gear armor so he'll have a hand that can punch Vali without activating his magic. Albion points out the two are equal and opposite and the idea is patently ridiculous, to which Ddraig lampshades this trope, and Issei proceeds to do it anyway.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy:
  • The key to flying is "throwing yourself at the ground and missing": being interrupted mid-fall and forgetting to hit and then—and this is vital—not thinking very hard about how you should be falling. Otherwise gravity will glance sharply in your direction and demand to know what the hell you think you're doing.
  • This was the method behind the invention of the Infinite Improbability Drive. By way of explanation, the theory behind finite improbability generators was well-understood by that point and largely consisted of ensuring that probability was twisted just right to ensure an otherwise improbable result. For example, ensuring that, at parties, every particle in the hostess' undergarments simultaneously quantum-leaped two feet to the left. The INFINITE Improbability Drive was considered something of a Holy Grail for scientists but after centuries of trying they gave up and declared that it was next to impossible to create one. An underclassman, cleaning up after one of those previously-mentioned parties, realized that if it was ALMOST impossible, there must be some real possibility of it, and decided to find out what would happen if he worked out how improbable such a drive was, fed the result into a finite improbability generator, gave it a really hot cup of tea, and turned it on. Moments later, a fully-functional Infinite Improbability Drive was created. Not long after that, the underclassman was lynched by the now-thoroughly-annoyed scientists.
• Honor Harrington:
  • The Graysons had to work out on their own how to use most Manticoran technology. They ended up making some revolutionary discoveries from this since part of the process included doing things no one already knowledgeable about the technology would have thought to try.
  • Honor herself remarks in The Honor of the Queen that the world's greatest swordsman doesn't fear the second greatest, but rather the worst swordsman because he has no idea what the idiot will do.
  • Graysons also are the known galaxy's experts in nuclear fission power. While everyone else had switched to fusion for safety and environmental reasons, Grayson had a very low-tech base and a lot of heavy metals, including radioactives. After several centuries, this resulted in safe, reliable, cheap, and powerful fission power plants, so effective that the Manticoran navy adopted them for their small combat ships/"fighters".
• Foxface's death in The Hunger Games occurs thanks to this. One of the more clever tributes, she survives the Games by stealth and caution, stealing food from the other tributes in small amounts that they're not likely to notice. This backfires on her when she steals berries collected by Peeta, who isn't wilderness-savvy enough to realize that they're extremely poisonous. Katniss notes after the fact that a deliberate trap would have never worked, but Foxface had no reason to think twice about eating something that another tribute had collected for his own consumption.
• In the Nick Polotta book Illegal Aliens, humans are told of a (non-existent) material on their ships called "deflector plating" that is immune to all weapon fire. While the aliens are busy snickering behind their hands at the gullible humans, we go and invent deflector plating.
• In the Inheritance Cycle, there exists a little girl named Elva with perfect precognitive abilities^note so long as the thing she's predicting involves pain, anyway and the power to know exactly the right words to completely destroy someone, or to build them back up, without using magic at all. Multiple characters comment that she could probably defeat the main antagonist single-handedly. Sure enough, when they get to him, he uses magic to prevent her from speaking, and then admits to being more frightened of her than any other living being. How did she come into existence? Because of Eragon's bad grammar. He was trying to bless her as a baby, and intended to say '...And may you be shielded from misfortune', but used the wrong tense of 'shield' and instead cast a spell with the wording 'may you be a shield from misfortune'. This gave her the ability to predict misfortune, and how to prevent or - once Eragon removed her compulsion to do the latter - cause it.
• Joe's World gives us Wolfgang Laebmauntsforscynneweëld and his twin powers of lunacy and amnesia. He's, for instance, crazy enough to cover several weeks' walk by foot in mere days.
• At the end of Quarterdeck, Kydd earns his place in high society by inviting Thérèse Bernardine-Mongenet to a banquet hosted by Prince Edward. What Kydd doesn't (and the rest of Canada does) know is that his lady is the Prince's mistress, who isn't allowed to be with him at occasions such as the banquet.
• In The Licanius Trilogy, Davian's initial journey is full of unbelievably lucky coincidences. That's because he managed to the full suite of his Augur powers without knowing that they even exist.
• Played with in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!. Catarina is consciously trying to prevent her future death or exile. But by accident, she does things that work a little too well. Without even meaning to, she ends up winning the hearts of all of the game's love interests, the other rival characters, and even the main heroine herself, while completely oblivious to this.
• In one of the Myst novelizations, The Book of Atrus, Katherine has been secretly learning how to write Ages, and when she shows one of her books to Atrus, he patronizes her by saying something like "Good idea, but it couldn't work in practice." She just tells him to flip to the last page, where a link exists to a fully stable, torus-shaped world with one side always facing the sun and viable life on both sides. Not only does this impress Atrus' socks off, but it fully drives home the fallacy of Gehn's way of thinking: In an infinite universe, anything that can exist, must exist somewhere.
• Orphans of the Sky, by Robert A. Heinlein: Hugh Hoyland, the protagonist, on learning his people's world is actually a spaceship, decides to teach himself how to pilot the ship. According to all common sense of astrogation, no single person can learn the necessary skills to fly a ship by himself, especially one of the size Hoyland was on. However, because all knowledge of this common sense was never printed in text, he never realized this and thus taught himself all the skills. This was repeated later in the novel when Hoyland, not realizing the difficulty of managing a landing and the sheer danger his life is in, successfully lands his craft on a planet, although in this case that was largely because the Ship's builders knew that it would be piloted by later-generation crew and put in very good autopilots.
• Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (originally part of The Little White Bird) is somewhere between this and Clap Your Hands If You Believe. As you should know, babies used to be birds. Peter Pan, at one week old, flies away from his home because he doesn't yet realize that little boys can't fly. Upon reaching Kensington Gardens he first begins to doubt whether he will be able to fly again, at which point he loses the ability. He does later get it back with the help of the fairies, though.
• In Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo is told, in the end, that The Quest he accomplished was, in fact, impossible. This is, in fact, the lesson of The Phantom Tollbooth: anything is possible, provided you don't know it's impossible.
• In Project Hail Mary, the Eridians have managed to build an astrophage-powered ship and successfully send it to Tau Ceti despite having very little understanding of how space works (in large part because they can't see and perceive the world through echolocation, plus their atmosphere is so dense that almost no light gets through). They also have nothing even approximating human computers, so the fact that they were able to navigate to another star is nothing short of a miracle. That said, they're extremely good at doing math in their "heads" (they don't actually have heads) and have an almost photographic memory. Unfortunately, all but one crewmembers died from cosmic radiation, as Eridians don't know what radiation is, so they never thought to shield their ship from it. And, unlike humans, they are extremely vulnerable to it. Rocky only survived because, as the ship's engineer, he spent most of his time surrounded by astrophage-filled fuel tanks, and astrophage is very good at absorbing radiation.
• Invoked in Rebuild World. Alpha doesn't actually expect a whole lot from Akira. As a random slum kid with no outstanding talents aside from his ability to interact with her, he normally wouldn't make it far at all without her help. But she doesn't tell him this, as planting that expectation in his mind would only drag him down. By letting him believe what she thought was impossible for him is possible, she thinks he may be able to prove her expectations wrong.
• In Riddle of the Seven Realms, the protagonists fly suspended beneath a balloon made out of lead. Astron, a demon to whom the human world's physics is new and fascinating, had simply improvised a substitute when the conveyance's original balloon was punctured by arrows, unaware that a "lead balloon" was considered preposterous by humans.
• In Rogue Sorcerer, Aiden manages to kill six master Sorcerers as well as unintentionally put a death curse on every other Sorcerer in existence in a gambit which he had been certain would end in his failure and death.
• In The Saint short story "The Newdick Helicopter", a Con Man sells a mark plans for a "helicopter" (actually a gyrocopter). When the mark assembles the helicopter, he discovers it cannot take off vertically as he expected it to. Assuming he had put it together wrong, he starts tinkering with it and ends up inventing a fully-functioning helicopter. (Note that this story was published in 1933, several years before the first fully-functioning helicopter was built.)
• In The Scholomance, at the end of the series, Orion Lake retains his ability to absorb energy from the mals he slays, despite having lost the maw-mouth half of him that enabled him to do so. El muses that this theoretically shouldn't be possible—but since willpower and belief are the primary driving forces behind magic anyway, Orion keeps his abilities anyway because that's just what everyone (Orion himself included) expects Orion himself to be capable of.
• In David Weber and Steven White's Starfire series, the war with the Bugs results in this happening when the newest members of the Grand Alliance, just getting introduced to the more advanced tech now available to them, innocently ask why the man-portable kinetic weapons that fire projectiles at 10% light speed, carried by infantry and ground vehicles for a century and a half, haven't been adapted to allow for bombardment from orbit, giving the equivalent of tactical nuclear strikes without the radiation and fallout. Alliance military researchers promptly smack themselves on the forehead and begin producing the weapon system from off-the-shelf equipment.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation Q Continuum trilogy, the evil omnipotent being is more powerful than Q because he's insane and can ignore/doesn't know the limits of omnipotence. It does help that he (it?) is also from a universe/dimension/existence that even the Q have no idea exists.
• In Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town, Lloyd continuously achieves this due to his lack of reference for what people outside his hometown can do.
  • There is a magical rune that can remove curses. Marie took years learning how to do it. Lloyd uses it as a cleaning aid.
  • He swats away the "pests" he finds - said "pests" being actually powerful monsters that the locals have trouble fighting off.
  • He accidentally prevents a war by clearing a landslide and using his magic to make it rain.
• In Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online, LLENN simply wanted to have a cute avatar in a VR FPS shooter, so she decided to have a pink outfit. Without realizing it, she chose the perfect camouflage for the desert at sunset or sunrise. This causes her to own the desert parts of the map, as no one else thought to use this as a color.
• Pretty much everything Richard does with his magic in The Sword of Truth. He routinely pulls off stunts that much older, learned, and experienced wizards and sorceresses believe are impossible. And in fact, Richard himself struggles with even the most basic of magic when he actively thinks about using his power. It turns out that Richard is a particular type of wizard called a War Wizard, who utilize their power purely on instinct and intuition rather than formal study. That's right, it's an entire school of wizardry that runs on this trope.
• "A Tall Tail" by Charles Stross tells the story of how American intelligence officials and engineers dreamed up the most ridiculously dangerous and impossible rocket system imaginable^note it ran on dioxygen difluoride and dimethylmercury and fed it to foreign agents (minus the "top secret component" that wasn't carefully leaked) in the hopes they'd actually try and build it, resulting in disastrous accidents that would affect their rocket/missile programs. The Soviets make it work... Briefly.
• The Tamuli has a god do this: the explanation given for why the trollish method of invisibility (involving hacking up time into smaller fragments) allows you to see and hear doesn't make sense. This is realized (or noted, for people who had already heard it before) by most people discussing it, but the troll god responsible doesn't, so it still works.
• In Uprooted, Agnieszka's accomplishments pretty much run on this. She uses a healing spell that her teacher has written off as useless, goes for whatever incantation and rhythm feels right rather than the carefully studied formulae that he follows, and rescues her best friend from the malevolent Wood because she didn't know completely what it would entail. Her active suggestions also rely on this, like using an incredibly dangerous text to cleanse her friend of The Corruption. (That said, she does also practice and study, just from books written by other intuitive mages like her.) Her teacher eventually gives up shouting How Unscientific! at her.
• Lightsong from Warbreaker is the grand master of an extremely complicated game he doesn't actually know the rules of. At one point someone remarks on how innovative his tactics are and how they would never have thought to use that ball for that throw; Lightsong does not mention that he picked it because it was the same color as his drink and threw it onto the field completely at random.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Nynaeve instinctively reinvents a form of Healing that uses all Powers instead of just Air, Water, and Spirit. The Aes Sedai of the Third Age are all adamant that this is dangerous and are shocked it even works, never mind that it actually works better. This is a running theme in regards to the Aes Sedai, that much of what they can and can't do is limited largely by tradition. That and a massive lack of initiative and imagination. The veil of general secrecy inherent within the White Tower is to blame for much of what was lost, with certain Aes Sedai not finding students they could trust to pass their skills onto and consequently taking their knowledge with them.
  • In tel'aran'rhiod, Perrin blocks a beam of the supposedly irresistible force of balefire with the palm of his hand as if it were nothing, leaving Egwene aghast, telling him what he's just done should be impossible. Perrin, who didn't even know what balefire was a moment before, merely shrugs. It's likely that if she'd tried to do the same thing, it would have been impossible because Your Mind Makes It Real and she's used to dealing with balefire in the waking world where it really is impossible to withstand. In Dream Land, though, it's no different than anything else and can be made or unmade on a whim... as long as you believe it can.
• Xanth makes this an actual magical power. Princess Ida's power of "idea" makes any idea suggested to her come true if it's thought up by someone who's not aware that this is her power. Several plot points are solved by Ida or someone else who knows how her power works purposefully leading an unwitting third party into coming up with a possible solution, which Ida's power can then make real. Ida herself did not know about her talent for quite some time, with the result that every idea she had coming true until she learned the nature of her power. Even the fact that Ida is a long-lost princess (and an identical twin to the previously-established Princess Ivy) was suggested by someone who simply thought that it was the sort of thing that usually happens in these stories, thus possibly making the whole thing something that her powers retconned into being.
  • In Ogre Ogre, Smash Ogre gains genius-level intelligence^note For an ogre. In human terms, he's above average. from holding an Eye Queue vine. We learn later that the vine's effects are normally both temporary and illusory (a person thinks they're smart). Smash's intelligence lasts until he's told this, where he lapses back into ogreish stupidity. He then realizes that the vine let him subconsciously tap into his human side (Smash is half-human, via his mother). Once he realizes this, not only can he call on said intelligence at will, he can transform fully human.^note Which later became a common ability of crossbreeds with human stock.
• This is the explanation given for why younger wizards in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series have more power than older, more experienced wizards — they don't know or necessarily care about what qualifies as 'impossible'. Lack of experience also makes them less predictable, and empowering wizards is part of a very long metagame. (Younger wizards are given access to more power with less oversight because they're likely to do more surprising things with it and enough of those surprises benefit reality to be worth the gamble. This is not all good — from the flip perspective younger wizards lack the experience to do all the necessary day-to-day maintenance work of wizardry and thus are typically empowered to make far worse mistakes and attract greater hostile attention — which not infrequently results in their deaths.)
• In The Zashiki Warashi of Intellectual Village Shinobu as a child would happily invite any youkai he met to come play with him. Majina notes that in doing so Shinobu is effectively "defusing" several dangerous youkai such as a God of Poverty, an act Hyakki Yakou struggles to replicate even once.