Once again, the memory a short story crawled its way out of the archives and is stuck in my head.
All that I remember is that humans came upon an utopian race of either aliens or isolated humans. They had no verbal or written communication, but instead only spoke telepathically (I think… they may have had no communication abilities at all).
Then, the humans taught this race language and all hell broke loose. Shortly after they learned to speak, they learned how to lie and keep secrets, and soon, their society crumbled.
This is obviously not it, but your story has some parallels to Ursula K LeGuin’s novel City of Illusions - an ET related to humans comes back to Earth and finds Earth dominated by aliens who are able to lie telepathically. Earth people have reverted to a hunter-gatherer tribal civilization.
Yep, it was science fiction. Sorry about that. I cannot remember if it took place on an extraterrestrial world or if it was a “lost” tribe of humans here on Earth.
That novel looks pretty interesting. I imagine there are quite a few stories with a variation on that theme.
A couple of questions. Can you estimate how long ago you read the story? Can you recall if you came across the story in a magazine, or was it in a book anthology (or some other place, like a website)? Thanks!
I don’t think so; the main character in that story learned from telepaths - they had nothing to learn from him (and I don’t think he’d forget the other characteristics of the telepaths, either).
I believe I read it in the mid to late 80s. I have a vague memory of it being part of an assignment, so it could have been in a high school literature text.
The Persistence of Vision isn’t ringing any bells, given what I can find about it online. I found it for $6 shipped though, so I ordered it.
I’m talking about the story; I could be misremembering, but I thought that by the end of the story the blind/deaf characters had acquired telepathy (and other powers).
At any rate, we’re in agreement that this can’t be the story that the OP is thinking of.
