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

[papersky.livejournal.com]

So in Asimov's autobiography, there's a moment where he hadn't written any SF for ages, just science stuff, and somebody asked him why he didn't write SF any more, and he said "Oh, the field has moved on," and the person (I think it was Judy Lynn Del Rey but I may be misremembering and it doesn't mater) said "You are the field" so he wrote The Gods Themselves and won a Hugo and a Nebula even though it was awful.

But my point is, we are the field.

So, why aren't you writing it? Why aren't I?

I guess I'm not because... it's been done and I haven't thought of anything new to do with it where it feels like it would be an interesting thing, and because it goes some squicky places. One is eugenic superhuman more evolved, like The Chrysalids, which is bothersome. One is Twu Wuv where people understand each other so much better because they read minds, like Spider Robinson. Now I think about it, the two best uses of it seem to me Midnight's Children and Dying Inside. Where could I go from there? And when I think what I could do with that the answer is, fantasy. It's fantasy.

I think possibly when Heinlein wrote Time For The Stars and Campbell was pushing all that psi, it was kind of possible to pretend that it might be something scientific there, but now... no. Nobody believes in it in that way, so it would be fantasy. And it is fantasy by that definition that says it's stuff done by the will because somebody is special. And saying "psi" makes it feel not like science put like pseudo-science, and I'd rather have magic than pseudoscience any day.

Having said all that, I have seen some interesting uses of psychic powers in romance -- not where it is the focus, that has almost always been AWFUL (even from writers I like when they're writing about Ohio) but for instance there's a lovely background thing in Lani Diane Rich's The Fortune Quilt where the heroine is sent to interview a woman who makes magic quilts, and the woman is a bit like Elise, except quilts, and when you buy your quilt she gives you a fortune and it's all specific and vague like "take the cab, give back the frog" and then it all actually comes true.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of the quilt lady. Is the rest of the book worthwhile?

One of the above commenters says of an Anne McCaffrey series that it's their jam, and honestly that's why I'm not writing psionics SF. It's not my jam. I loved Intervention and the Galactic Milieu trilogy, but not in an "I should do that!" way, in an "I am 12 years old and Uncle Rogi is fandom" sort of way.

Also I really love that the message you took from that Asimov story is that we are the field, not that Isaac Asimov specifically was the field. Could've gone either way for a lot of people, but not for you, and I appreciate that about you.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The rest of The Fortune Quilt is a romance novel, with the romance novel's tragic flaw of being essentially interested in people falling in love. Apart from that it's pretty good. It has quite good chosen family and actual family stuff, handled well, and a memorable Thanksgiving dinner. It's also got some good funny dialogue. But mostly what I remember is "give back the frog". I think "Oh, that give-back-the-frog book, I liked that one." It's very short, and about tuppence as an e-book.

To be fair to Asimov, who could be conceited enough at times, I'm sure that was his intended message, that the field is what we make it, not something we are outside, and that he was implicitly including you and me in that, even though you weren't born yet and I was about ten.