Kamarling
Member
I've been mulling over this subject for years: it seems to me that psi has, in recent decades, been chased out of Science Fiction or, at best, included but with a materialist veneer. The thought cropped up again while I've been watching the 10 year old US Sci-Fi series "The 4400" on a local streaming service.
Without giving too much away the premise is that a group of 4400 abductees are returned to a place near Seattle one day in 2004. These people turn out to have certain abilities which we would usually categorise as psi, including PK, pre-cognition, telepathy and a host of others. There is also a prominent character who is shot and killed but who later returns as some kind of resurrected messiah (his initials are - you guessed - JC).
Yet throughout, we have a pseudo-scientific, materialist overlay so that we learn that these abilities are somehow enabled by some advanced neurotransmitter called Promicin. We have science nerds working in the basement of this FBI-like centre in Seattle. These guys seem to be experts in everything from software engineering to genetics to psychology - anything remotely sciency. The paranormal pervades the show but is never once mentioned!
Now, to get to the point, I remember reading science fiction in my youth which had no qualms about including psi abilities without the need to include a materialist explanation for them. Phillip K. Dick used psi abilities in his stories while my favourite was a story by Theodore Sturgeon called More Than Human.
The writer of this review says something similar:
I stopped watching Dr. Who when it became clear that the then showrunner, Russell T. Davies was promoting his atheist ideology in the story lines. Anything ghostly, for example, was eventually debunked by the science-hero Doctor. Ironically, at the same time, the so-called science fantasies became ever more far-fetched (what that screw-driver could do was beyond fantasy). It seems to be policy across the board in British TV that psi should be avoided or explicitly debunked although some gems have made it through (the supreme example being the superb Life on Mars).
Without giving too much away the premise is that a group of 4400 abductees are returned to a place near Seattle one day in 2004. These people turn out to have certain abilities which we would usually categorise as psi, including PK, pre-cognition, telepathy and a host of others. There is also a prominent character who is shot and killed but who later returns as some kind of resurrected messiah (his initials are - you guessed - JC).
Yet throughout, we have a pseudo-scientific, materialist overlay so that we learn that these abilities are somehow enabled by some advanced neurotransmitter called Promicin. We have science nerds working in the basement of this FBI-like centre in Seattle. These guys seem to be experts in everything from software engineering to genetics to psychology - anything remotely sciency. The paranormal pervades the show but is never once mentioned!
Now, to get to the point, I remember reading science fiction in my youth which had no qualms about including psi abilities without the need to include a materialist explanation for them. Phillip K. Dick used psi abilities in his stories while my favourite was a story by Theodore Sturgeon called More Than Human.
The writer of this review says something similar:
Parapsychology something many were equally optimistic about, it features in numerous works of the era.Alfred Bester put it to wide use, as did Jack Vance, Frederik Pohl, Phillip K. Dick, Harry Harrison, (early) Robert Silverberg, and others toward telling stories of the mentally possible, and in turn popularizing the idea.But the pinnacle of psi-power’s sanguinity is certainly Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human.
I stopped watching Dr. Who when it became clear that the then showrunner, Russell T. Davies was promoting his atheist ideology in the story lines. Anything ghostly, for example, was eventually debunked by the science-hero Doctor. Ironically, at the same time, the so-called science fantasies became ever more far-fetched (what that screw-driver could do was beyond fantasy). It seems to be policy across the board in British TV that psi should be avoided or explicitly debunked although some gems have made it through (the supreme example being the superb Life on Mars).