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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Would they also toss James H. Schmitz's "Federation of the Hub" stories into the fantasy pot, since many of them feature a heroine who is a powerful telepath, and psi powers are an accepted part of her society?
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Psi powers are like warp drive and time travel: Conventions that have just been accepted into SF because they've been around for so long, regardless of the evidence against its existence (or lack of evidence for its existence, depending on how you look at it). |
Oh, sure. I think of such things as wallpaper. At this point, they are taken for granted, and the author may not bother with an explanation of how they work.
I enjoyed the tack taken by David Brin in his Uplift series: if it was possible to go FTL at all, there was more than one way to do it, and different galactic species used different methods. The Tandu, for instance, had a Client species called the Episiarchs, developed for psi powers. A Tandu ship got from one place to another because a resident Episiarch
denied the ship was where it was so strongly that space warped around it, and Poof! - the ship was somewhere else. Sometimes the ship went Poof! and
didn't reappear, so no other species adopted the method, but the Tandu were willing to accept the risks.
Brian Aldiss did a story where the narrator says "FTL travel? Oh, yes. Had it for decades. I'd be happy to tell you how it works, but the printer refuses to typeset the three pages of equations needed to
give the explanation, so lets just take my word for it and carry on, shall we?" I just about fell off my chair laughing.
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Dennis