Deadly Silents

Killough, Lee. Deadly Silents. New York: Ballantine, 1981.

Terran cops brought to an alien world to help stop violent crimes coming from an equivalent of ethnic strife in a culture in which "right brain" dominance and telepathy are normal and being a nontelepathic Silent is abnormal. The cops are Terran-normal: left-brain dominant and sufficently a part of a highly computerized operation to be described by Betsy Harfst in a paper at the 13th Annual Convention of the Popular Culture Association as "walking extensions of the machine" ("A Brain Divided: Behavior and Motive in Deadly Silents," Wichita, April 1983), source for this entry. See M. Crichton's Andromeda Strain and the article thereon by P. Alterman, cited under Literary Criticism.