Telepaths of Atlantis

in the Ekcolir Reality

 Previously, I mentioned the claim that the earliest use of the term "teleportation" was in 1931. What about "telepathy"? Apparently the term "telepathy" was invented by Frederic Myers some time around 1882.

 

A Seventh Child (1894) by Henrietta Stannard is about a ten year old girl, Nancy, who can "read minds". Making use of her telepathic ability, Nancy saves her older sister from marrying the secretive Mr. Devereux, a man with a dark past. Devereux label's Nancy's mind reading ability as "second sight". With time and after several more seemingly random telepathic visions, Nancy takes to thinking of herself as a clairvoyant. However, using her "special sense" is very tiring for Nancy and since it only seems to provide visions of emotionally disturbing events, she avoids using her telepathic ability and hopes that it will disappear as she grows up.

The League of Yrinna

The Fictional Science of Telepathy

For the Exode Saga, I have fun imagining that human telepathy first became possible in the far future of the Asimov Reality, after a lengthy effort to modify human gene combinations and take advantage of the presence of the femtobot endosymbiont that had been provided by the Phari. 

 

Once the required human gene combinations had been found, they could be sent into the past and inserted into the human population of Earth some 10-20,000 years in our past. So, why shouldn't an occasional human such as Nancy (as depicted in A Seventh Child) have some telepathic abilities? For my story "Hierion Writers Club" I pretend that Mary is one such person with telepathic abilities.

Grendels

And what if there were other creatures on Earth with telepathic powers? In the Exode Saga, I imagine that humans evolved on Earth with the help and guidance of Grendels, Interventionists who often deployed artificial lifeforms with humanoid appearance on Earth. The Grendels hid themselves away in burrows under springs, rivers and beaches, emerging only when needed to help adjust the course of human history.

Last Grendel on Earth

The Grendels were derived genetically as a variant of the Prelands. When the Trysta-Grean Pact went into effect, only humans were allowed on Earth. "The Dead Widower Society" is an account of how the last Preland was removed from Earth.

interior art by Virgil Finlay

In the 1927 story "Atlantis' Exile" by Cyril Hume, we are told that a population of aquatic humanoids lives in a city at the bottom of the sea. The resident's of Atlantis use advanced technology to survive including a magical chemical which if released in small amount into the waters of their city allows human slaves to survive there without breathing.

Occasionally, the residents of Atlantis pull some humans down to their city and employ them as workers doing menial tasks such as clearing away seaweed. "Atlantis' Exile" is told from the perspective of an old man who worked for many years in Atlantis.

Having been re-published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, "Atlantis' Exile" is not much of a science fiction story, but it does depict the aquatic humanoids of Atlantis as being telepathic.

vision of a dead man (see)

In A Seventh Child, Nancy is able to make use of her telepathic abilities to help save her brother from being murdered, only to have him then die from cholera. There is an even bigger "twist of fate" at the core of A Seventh Child, which I will not spoil here. There are many stories about people with limited telepathic abilities and plots that explore the question: would they be better off without their special telepathic powers? One such story is found in the film Next, which mixes telepathic powers with a form of time travel that makes possible the viewing of future events.

Converting telepathy into fictional science. In A Seventh Child, Nancy is able to see a bottle of poison in another woman's pocket. Nobody would describe A Seventh Child as being science fiction, but the 1927 story The Man with Six Senses by Muriel Jaeger features the same kind of telepathic vision and some effort was made to depict a fictional science basis for the telepathy. 

 

"Hierion Writers Club"

Get Rich Quick. If you had the ability to see objects in people's pockets, would you try to exploit that ability to become rich, maybe by "viewing" the location of hidden oil deposits? Written in much the same "spirit" as The Man with Six Senses was Jack Vance's story featuring remote viewing, "Parapsyche", which also involves finding oil by means of psychic powers. 

 

For my story "Hierion Writers Club" I pretend that Mary has limited telepathic abilities that would do her little good on Earth. For example, she has a telepathic connection to her pet cat. However, Mary is taken into the Hierion Domain where her telepathic powers can be amplified by advanced technology and used to help shape the course of human history.

Related Reading: an even older story about "second sight"

Next: part 2 of "Grean Fiction"

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