AUTHOR’S NOTE: My contemplation of the scientific experiments of Dr. Dean Radin in the subtle field of psionics (Real Magic, 2018) brought me back to one of my favorite fictional explorations of psychic ability. Think of it as a nightmare vision of an unlikely future.

In his 1956 science-fiction novel The Stars My Destination,* Alfred Bester introduced a character who had an unfortunate social handicap: she was a “tele-send” – a reverse telepath – who unintentionally broadcast her unfiltered thoughts to anyone in the immediate vicinity but could never receive thoughts from other people. She had no outbound gatekeeper, only an inbound mental block, and her transmitter was always “on” in a non-aural simulation of “thinking out loud.”

Imagine the chaotic scene in a nightclub: “<That guy sure has a nice . . . > Damn, I didn’t mean to think that out loud!” as they all converge on her eagerly. She could not go out in polite company and was limited to teaching, where her inherent disadvantage was a distinct advantage as long as she was able to focus her unruly attention on the subject at hand. But for all other practical purposes she was a psychic cripple.

Along the same lines, Bester proposed an extremely volatile and highly destructive metal called PyrE that would detonate if anyone even directed a stray thought toward it. Putting a tele-send together with PyrE would be a recipe for large-scale disaster. This was an example (brought to a fever pitch of paranoia in Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo) of the 1950s sci-fi writers’ post-War preoccupation with turning anything into a devastating weapon that might remotely lend itself to that use. (The reference to the atomic bomb was unmistakable.)

Then there was his notion of worldwide teleportation or, in his clever turn of phrase, “jaunting” to and from designated hubs. The mobile masses flitted from continent-to-continent at the speed of thought for both business and pleasure. But can you visualize (as Bester surmised) teleporting to the same coordinates at the same split-second as someone else? “Splat! Send in the cleanup crew!”

Instead of “Beam me up” it would be “Mop me up, Scotty,” and there would be no “President Skroob” with his butt on backwards. This entertaining fantasy reminded me that I recently joked about the Firesign Theater’s old album title, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All? From a more serious angle, Aleister Crowley discussed the fact that two people cannot occupy the same physical space at precisely the same moment in time so each must therefore be an autonomous “star” pursuing a uniquely independent orbit. But I don’t think Bester was channeling The Law Is For All.

The cautionary tale of Robin Wednesbury, Bester’s character, in her catastrophic encounters with tele-sending, had a precursor in the Hermetic text of The Kybalion that, under the esoteric principles of Vibration and Polarity, examined the premise of influencing someone else’s thoughts using the vibratory energy of one’s own mental processes as the “sending” terminal and the other’s mind as the “receiving” end of the circuit. The obvious difference is that the sender doesn’t let the intended recipient know the underlying purpose of the contact, especially if the former works for an advertising agency. Vance Packard once wrote a book, The Hidden Persuaders, about that very topic.

I doubt that the human race is within 200 years (and probably far beyond that) of achieving Bester’s vision of proto-psionics (not to mention galactic space travel), although parapsychologist Dean Radin has had quite a bit to say on the first subject from an academic perspective that may yet change my mind.

*Bester’s book is excellent and way ahead of its time in its graphic treatment of printed text; if you’re familiar with comic-book visual sound effects – “Wham! Bam! Zap! Pow!” – you will find common ground in its pages even though it’s not a graphic novel and its handling of the concept is deftly literary.