Paranormal powers (telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, etc.) were originally considered mystical or magical; then beginning in the 1950s there was serious research into whether “parapsychology” was a real phenomenon worthy of scientific study. This had the side effect of leading to an explosion of science fiction works depicting various kinds of mental powers.
After decades of investigation, no unambiguous evidence has turned up, and many studies that had seemed to offer evidence of Psi have been found flawed. In short, here in the year 2005 there seems but little chance that psionic powers could turn out to be real. So should telepathy no longer be part of “hard” science fiction, any more than seances or voodoo should be? *
Although this would torpedo, among other things, much of Larry Niven’s Known Space series, which are great reads.
Were psychic powers ever part of “hard” SF? And just because something would be disqualified from hard SF doesn’t mean it’s disqualified from SF altogether.
And then there are things striding the gulf between SciFi and Fantasy, like Star Wars or the Pern crap.
Fantasy and SF are essentially the same genre anyway, just distinguished by setting - and they each have their ‘harder’ equivalents, which ultimately become just period-piece fiction.
not to mention that some kinds of paranormal stuff along these lines would fit with scifi if it was the kind created by science…breeding, gene manipulation that sort of stuff, just because we cant find the slightest shred of evidence shouldnt exclude it from fiction, it is fiction after all.
I think it is a mistake to assign books(etc.) to SF or Fantasy based on simple elements like “existance of psychic powers”, “existance of dragons”, “space travel”, or “aliens”. To my mind, whether something is SF or Fantasy has more to do with how those elements are iused than with whether they exist.
I was amused by a library I was in that classed Anne McCaffrey’s series which started with the The Rowan moved on to her daughter Damia and later to Damia’s Children (italics in this paragraph mean book titles) all as science fiction and the Pern books all as fantasy. Umm, they are all written by McCaffrey, which suggests to me the same level of research/scientific scrutiny.
OK, OK, I am aware that McCaffrey has written a couple of pure fantasy stories. And yes, I am aware that there are authors (like Andre Norton) who write books that are clearly fantasy and others that are clearly Science Fiction. But as someone who has enjoyed the majority of McCaffrey’s work-- I recognize that she generally strikes a balance that I enjoy, and I fail to see any good reason to put Pern with Fantasy and her Talent series in SF.
It’s not that easty – science fiction can postulate the existence of a phenomenon and se where it leads. You can make up plausible explanations for telepathy. Just because the sort of human telepathy people like Rhine were looking for (I don’t know if Rhine himself ever did look for telepathy, to tell the truth) wasn’t convincingly found wouldn’t rule it out as a possibility. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man would be a science fiction classic because it examined the ramifications of a society in which telepathy was a given, regardless of how it occurred.
(One reason the paranormal claims of telepathy and telekinesis bugged physical scientists, by the way, is that they didn’t seem to folow the usual rules – they didn’t depend upon distance, for instance. Electromagnetic wavesdie off as the inverse square of distance – even lasers, if you get far enough away. So do sound waves and particle flux and just about any physical phenomenon. But not psi, according its supporters.)
But you could imagine ways in which telepathy took place, and followed physical laws. Hard-Core Sf writer Hal Clement assumed physical telepathy in one of the stories in Natives of Space. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had believable IT-system-based telepathy in Oath of Fealty.
So, no, telepathy is still a fit topic for SF.
Well, Astounding in the '50s were full of stories about telepathy. And the first Pern story appeared in Analog. So I think it is fair to say they were part of hard (or hardish) sf - at least in Campbell’s opnion.
Back then there was some hope that telepathy would be proven. Now I think they’d be more fantasy, unless a very good scientific sounding explanation for how it worked was given.
Not that it reall matters. The good thing about using the term “sf” is you don’t have to worry about such fine distinctions.
Pern series: Dragonriders, feudal-type society, therefore fantasy. The fact that the dragons were genetically engineered (or were they just bred from local stock?) and the feudal society is made up of the decendents of space colonists is nit-picking.
Talent series: Recognizably Earth, technological society, space travel, therefore science fiction. The fact that there is no (known) possible physics-based explanation for telepathy (let alone telekinesis or precognition) is nitpicking.
Ok, so that’s (mostly) tongue-in-cheek, but may have a bit of truth. The breakdown between SF and Fantasy in many people’s opinion (inluding the ones who categorize books) can come just from the world around the story. If it looks like Earth before now (probably specifically before current-day America and Europe), it’s fantasy. If it looks like Earth now or later, it’s science fiction.
Personally, I think that any SF story can take just about any premise and extrapolate from it. SF will generally try to give some justification, fantasy takes the premise more as a given.
I don’t see any point in excluding something from Science Fiction just because you can’t prove it scientifically.
As far as we can tell right now, you’re never going to be able to build a practical zero gravity ship in which we can walk around in like they do in just about every science fiction book and film on the planet. In terms of being functional and workable on a “ship” the overhead and cost in power is just not worth it, if it can even be done.
So, let’s leave out 2001, 2010, 2030 among others.
Let’s dump “The Foundation Trilogy” since there’s a psychic character in it.
Hard core SF is far less interesting and devoid of many of the conventions that make human stories work. I’m not saying you couldn’t make it work, but you would have a hard time selling it to more than a few hard core science geeks.
It just assumes that the fantastic elements have a “scientific” basis. The basis can be actual science, or an unstated type of science unknown to scientists today (e.g., FTL drive).
Thus, telepathy is science fiction if it’s assumed that the telepathic powers come from some sort of scientific reasoning (including science unknown to us today). It’s fantasy if it comes from some sort of magical spell (magic defined as being something that doesn’t have a scientific basis*)
So the point of taxonomy is moot. Telepathy is science fiction because it’s usually assumed to have a scientific basis and is thus SF. But since all SF is fantasy, the question is unimportant.
*I’m partial to Asimov’s definition that indicates fantasy involves getting energy from nothing. If it goes against the first or second laws of thermodynamics, it’s magic.
My own experiences with telepathy indicate that it is a real phenomenon, but not extrasensory in nature at all, rather being a heuristic skill. When you know another person thoroughly enough, you can accurately extrapolate, by a Gestalt process, precisely what he/she would think/is thinking in response to a given stimulus. This is indistinguishable from telepathy as it is usually depicted, although it results completely from heuristic psychological processes and requires being present (in person or by technological communication) at the source of stimulus. I have little doubt that the claims leading to the ESP-type telepathy are derived from distorted reports of this real-though-rare phenomenon.
Wasn’t it Campbell who defined science fiction as “that which is published by science fiction editors”? He wasn’t one to let nitpicking definitions for genres get in the way of publishing a good story.
