Where are they now: science fiction with weird psychic phenomena

[mrissa]

So I just finished reading a Peter Dickinson novel that had psychics in it. And it reminded me once again: where did all the science fiction novels with psychics go? I’m not sure I miss them. There are still some places you can find things like telekinetics–mostly superpower-tinged stories like Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith’s Stranger. But Karen Lord’s straight-up interplanetary novel with characters with telepathy felt like the sort of thing I would have read at age 14 and just don’t see any more.

Where did they go? Because ESP/telepathy/mental powers show up very early in SF, and they show up very regularly until somewhere around the time I was in high school. When they just…don’t really any more. Was it that people finally felt comfortable that these things had been debunked, and people who want to write about them write fantasy? Was it that there was a cohort of people writing those stories in the ’80s (Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May, Andre Norton) who then either stopped writing, died, or moved on to other things, leaving “psychic power novels” as feeling like “their” thing rather than a broader genre thing? Was it the overwhelmingly female nature of that group, giving the concept “girl cooties?” (Catherine Asaro was writing about telepaths well into my college days, and she has demonstrated her bravery in the face of girl cooties on a number of fronts, so maybe.) Did it just start to feel old-fashioned, or did it really get played out? Was it the rise of willingness to do superhero/comic book themes in prose that pushed these topics into that category? (Seems like it happened in the opposite order, though.) Do you have an explanation I haven’t thought of?

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Comments

[arkuat]

I've long now been convinced that science fiction is a particularly bratty and demanding subgenre of fantasy. I do love it so.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, you know, to me there's more than one sense of "fantasy." There's the broad sense, which is "the literature of the fantastic," and includes science fiction, fantasy in the narrow sense, superhero adventure, much horror, utopia, dystopia, paranormal romance, and various other genres (though I would argue that much alternate history doesn't actually belong there). And there's the narrow sense, genre fantasy, stories whose disbelief suspension appeals to myths, legends, fairy tales, and similar things, or to the kind of phenomena that they portray, such as gods and magic.

[arkuat]

Yeah, there's all that, and then there's all the supposedly "non-fiction" to sort out as well.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

But the nonfiction is not a genre of fiction and probably does not follow the literary conventions of fiction, for the most part.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

To at least reduce the confusion, I've usually heard the broader sense just called "the fantastic," as in the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Although Todorov has a different, specific defintiion of "the fantastic," causing different confusion, usually people call that "the Todorovian fantastic."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Sure, and I don't find that an unreasonable terminology. I'm just noting "fiction of the fantastic" as one possible meaning of "fantasy," and one that's well defined as a taxon. A category that includes genre fantasy, and science fiction up to a particular reader's/viewer's cutoff point of "not rigorous enough"—like E. E. Smith saying that the Lensman series was science fiction but the Skylark series was not—strikes me as taxonomically bad in the same way that "invertebrate" is taxonomically bad: There is no actual trait that all invertebrates have in common that all animals don't have in common.