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

The tests didn't pan out?

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Here via ... at this point, I'm not sure anymore, but I know I've read a story of yours in a recent Analog.

Anyway ...

Some years ago, I had the pleasure of doing some research for the late Judy Merrill — going through personal correspondence at the (Canadian) National Archives. One thing that struck me was that she engaged in more than a few psi experiments with friends via mail. I forget the details, but the basic idea was something like this: One person would gree to think of something specific and, and the other would try to "receive" it.

Needless to say, successes were rare, and ambiguous when they occurred.

All of which is to suggest that telepathy as a trope in SF waned as experiments and tests in the real world failed to produce convincing results.

Re: The tests didn't pan out?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This sort of fits with the fact that most of the telepathics/psychics in earlier SF stories that had them were basically portrayed as people whose brains were so smart that they did even more etc.--it was not only used as the next stage of human development but the next stage of smart people development. So no wonder the SF writers of the time were testing themselves for it--they had a self-image as very smart people--and became discouraged when they didn't display it.

This is actually one of the things about the Peter Dickinson novel I just read: it treated psychic powers as the result of a genetic disease that gave people cognitive deficits in other areas, not made them obviously super-smart.

Re: The tests didn't pan out?

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The idea of "subnormal" people with psi powers was also a thing for a while. Margery Allingham's The Mind Readers has a minor character like that. I think it was supposed to be a splinter skill, like lightning calculation.

Re: The tests didn't pan out?

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

So no wonder the SF writers of the time were testing themselves for it--they had a self-image as very smart people--and became discouraged when they didn't display it.

Agreed that they largely thought of themselves as being pretty smart people, but I think it's too broad to assume they all became discouraged when they didn't find it. I suspect many just shrugged — Well, maybe not — and went on to other speculations.

The Dickinson conceit somehow reminds me of Peter Watts' vampires, among other things I've come across in the past few years, that use genetics and/or disease to re-new traditional tropes.