Psi and Technology in Science Fiction

Stratton, Susan. "Psi and Technology in Science Fiction." The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts No. 36 = 9.4 (1998): 324-335. Special Issue "On Psi Powers." Ed. H. L. Drake.

Stratton discusses her topic under the following headings:

"Psi Allied With Technology," illustrated with Muriel Jaeger's The Man with Six Senses. (q.v.). In this novel, Jaeger does not challenge the supremacy of twentieth-century technology; she just asks for recognition that human development is also important" (Stratton 327).

"Psi Parallel With Technology — But More Significant," illustrated with Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935), with John demonstrating "technological precocity" in inventing "household and personal labor-saving devices" (Stratton p. 327), and generally having as his "particular gift" the "application of psychokinesis to technological problems," until his work on atomic-energy engines for vehicles leads to an understanding of matter that allows his mind to work on matter directly," making technology decidedly "less significant" (Stratton 328).

"Distinction Between Psi and Technology is Meaningless," discussed with Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).[1] Kind of a "null case" since the psi powers of Michael Valentine Smith are based in language and might be a kind of "techne," technics, or technique (our terms) but otherwise — "Heinlein does not overtly relate technological and psychic development in Stranger; the two seem incomparable. The psychic growth which relates to 'growing closer' and 'grokking' is so fundamental that technology is comparatively irrelevant [...]" (Stratton 330). Unlike Odd John's basing John's powers in "'psychophysics,'" in Stranger, Heinlein "simply introduces a conceptual framework that dissolves any distinctions between the applications of science we call technology and whatever applications of philosophy or religion produce a mental impact on matter and mental communication between individuals" (Stratton 331).

"Psi and Technology Fundamentally Opposed," discussed in Sally Miller Gearhart's The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979). "Unlike Heinlein" in Stranger and opposed to Jaeger in The Man with Six Senses and "her effort to align her character's clairvoyance with technology," this collection of linked stories "is anti-technological, associating technology explicitly with a masculine urge to dominate" (Stratton 331).

Stratton concludes, both in terms of "inference" and closing paragraph, that as the 20th century proceeded, "psifiction" ceased trying "to rescue psi from association with spiritualists," as in The Man with Six Senses, and moved toward a recuperative task to counter technology's increasingly "alienating effects" and "to rescue people from technocracy." All of the works she has discussed "focus on enhancement of abilities that strengthen the individual's connections to the rest of the universe as a response to the alienating effects of technology" (p. 334).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 2Mar19