By the age of thirteen, our subject, Artemis Fowl, was displaying
signs of an intellect greater than any human since Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart. Artemis had beaten European chess champion Evan Kashoggi in
an on-line tournament, patented more than twenty-seven inventions, and
won the architectural competition to design Dublin’s new opera house. He
had also written a computer program that diverted millions of dollars from
Swiss accounts to his own, forged more than a dozen Impressionist
paintings that now hang in various galleries worldwide, and cheated the
Fairy People out of a substantial amount of gold.
-The Arctic Incident, Prologue