Straitjacket

In the Ekcolir Reality
Original cover art by Lawrence Stevens

My current writing obsession, the Exode Saga, includes telepathy as one of its imaginary technology plot elements. Many of the earliest science fiction stories that I read included telepathy in some form. The Lensman Series had technology-assisted telepathy as did Asimov's Foundation Saga.

The first story by Jack Vance that I read was "The Moon Moth", a story that I've previously described as a gateway drug for becoming addicted to Vance's fiction. "The Moon Moth", along with most of the Vance novels that I like, were not built around telepathy, but Vance often alluded to some kind of latent telepathic ability in some of his characters.

floating city of the Teleks

Vance's story about telekinesis, "Telek",  was published in Astounding Science Fiction, January 1952. In that issue, there was an editorial called "Proposed History" by Campbell. He suggested that about 8,000 years ago, a new form of human being arose (homo superior). This allowed for the creation of large social systems (empires) and human society as we know it.

Campbell described the origin of homo superior in terms of mutation; a purely mental change, not reflected in the human physical form. Of course, all the genes that are expressed in the brain can be used in other tissues, so we should expect some morphological changes in the physical features of our imaginary mental mutants.

Mutants

Don't bring a knife to a telekinesis fight

In 1945, Asimov gave us The Mule, a mutant human born with powerful "mentalic" abilities. Later, Asimov developed the idea that human parapsychology was latent in the human species, the required genes needing to be brought together and combined with training in order to produce a superior class of rulers (the Second Foundation). In the Lensman Series, there were all-knowing aliens who could guide telepathic humans and make sure that the telepathy-endowing lenses were not misused. In Vance's "Telek", the "mentalic" powers of the Teleks had to be spread to all of Humanity in order to prevent a two-class society from forming.

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Click image to enlarge.

I previously mentioned "The Golden Man", a 1954 story by P. K. Dick in which a "mentalic" mutant is hunted by normal humans who do not want to be replaced by a homo superior. He later (January 1956) wrote  "The Minority Report", a story about "precog" mutants that become the tools of "normal" human society.

Children of the Lens

Straitjacket
Yes, it is exciting to imagine the sudden arrival of people with new "mantalic" abilities and their impact on society, but there is the mundane reality (see The impossibility of intelligence explosion) which makes such things about as likely as me tinkering around in my basement and suddenly discovering the secret to faster-than-light space travel.

Mutate Me

cover art by Fred Kirberger

Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, August 1955 (download here).  In that issue is "Twink", a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, who was born in 1918. Sturgeon set "Twink" in his own future, in the year 1973. The story features a pill-pushing doctor (Champlain) who gives the main character Dexamyl, five days before the FDA tried to ban the drug. Maybe Sturgeon was psychic.

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Champlain is described as the man who continued the parapsychology research of Rhine. The main character in the story is portrayed as having some parapsychological ability. He has a telepathic connection to his daughter, Twink.

retrotelepathy

For the Exode Saga, I'm trying to introduce technology-assisted telepathy as a plot element. "Rylla" has some capacity to use the Bimanoid Interface, and I want readers to experience discovery of telepathy as Rylla begins to make use of the Interface.

Related Reading: more retrotelepathy
Vance's short story "Parapsyche".


Next: beyond good and evil

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