Telepathy in 1927

In the Ekcolir Reality.

They're weird and they're wonderful. In the 1920s, some really weird stories (including a reprint of Dagon and some Cthulhu stories) were published in Weird Tales. When men such as Hugo Gernsback were inventing the science fiction literary genre, they wanted stories that were a bit less weird and that could mesh with the burgeoning enterprise of science research and technological reality.

I like to imagine that scientific advances arrived at a slightly accelerated pace in the Ekcolir Reality. Shown to the right is a patent for radio-assisted telepathy from 1927 in the Ekcolir Reality.

Sadly, in our reality, technologies such as television were just beginning in the 1920s. Reading issues of Gernsback's Amazing Stories reminds me of what it was like to read Byte magazine back in the early days of the personal computer revolution. Here is an ad from the August 1927 issue of Amazing:

global communications in 2025

In that issue, there was a strange story by E. D. Skinner about events in the year 2025. At the inspirational core of Gernsback's technological boosterism was the world of electronics, radio and the dream of television.  Skinner depicted a future in which global telecommunications networks were commonplace.

Of course, nobody writing speculative fiction in the 1920s was able to imagine technological details from the coming century such as the invention of semiconductors and integrated circuits.

image source

Biology in Sci Fi
I've always been more interested in biology than the physical sciences, so it is fun for me to look at old Sci Fi stories that emphasize speculative future biology rather imaginary advances in electronic devices. I went to the August 1927 issue of Amazing to read "The Tissue-Culture King" by Julian Huxley.

interior artwork by Frank R. Paul

Huxley and his wife
(1924) source

I find it difficult to classify this story by Huxley as being part of the science fiction genre. The story makes use of a rather standard adventure plot in which a remote corner of the Earth is discovered to be the site of an amazing scientific research project. In this case, one mad scientist has been performing biological experiments on the people and animals of a remote African kingdom.

see

While people such as Gernsback were popularizing the new age of radio and electronics, there was a similar revolution in tissue culture during the early 20th century. Tissue culture was a well known technique in biomedical research when Huxley's name appeared on an article in 1925 called "Self-Differentiation in the Grafted Limb-Bud of the Chick".

Before the 1940s and the availability of antibiotics, tissue culture work required careful sterile techniques (see the image to the right). It is not clear that Huxley ever actually performed any tissue transplantation or culture techniques himself. The work in the 1925 article was most likely performed by Murray, Huxley's co-author.

The origins of telepathy.

"The Tissue-Culture King" starts out like a sequel to The Island of Doctor Moreau. A British scientist has been living in Africa and performing bizarre cell culturing experiments designed to please the local king and mesh with the local religion. All of the king's subjects now maintain cultures of cells from the king and believe that this promotes and supports the power and vitality of their king. In his spare time, the scientist likes to dabble in other biology experiments aimed at creating altered animals such as two-headed toads, tall soldiers and fat women.

Telepathy
Eventually readers learn that the scientist is also conducting experiments on telepathy. He has discovered that by hypnotizing the natives, they can synchronize their thoughts and transmit powerful telepathic signals. Luckily, by wearing a metallic hat, the scientist can protect himself from the telepathic signals.

in the Ekcolir Reality

All of these goings on in Africa are reported by our intrepid author, who accidentally stumbled upon the Kingdom of Tissue Culture. The story narrator was able to escape from Africa and feels duty bound to report his experiences as a warning about the dangers of uncontrolled scientific advancements.

During the 1920s, Huxley was probably ill with bipolar disorder. It is easy to view his story, "The Tissue-Culture King" as an expression of a manic phase in his illness. As far as I know, Huxley did not write any other fiction.

femtobots

Soon after writing "The Tissue-Culture King", Huxley abandoned his university professorship and began writing The Science of Life.

It is fun to imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, Huxley was contacted by a scientific collaborator who had discovered the existence of femtobots inside living cells. Those femtobots provided the basis for a type of technology-assisted telepathy.

Next: artificial intelligence jumps the shark

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