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Ah yes, the Golden Age! Good times.
Star Wars aside, I prefer my science fiction without nonsense like psychic powers. To me that's just magic and belongs in a fantasy story.
I guess I'm willing to make exceptions though. I liked Minority Report as movie though. I just ignored all the precognition stuff and focused on the futuristic, and mostly plausible, tech.
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@corpore-metal: so you'd be ok with stories that have psychic powers in them if we ever advance to the point where they appear to be the next imminant step in development?
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@tetracycloide:
If the telepathy could be explained in a way that is remotely plausible, perhaps zillions of nanobots in my brain wiretapping my neurons, sending these signals out through a fiber optic cable to another person with similar nanobots and cable in his head. This might be just remotely believable enough for me to suspend disbelief. But telepathy based on some mysterious, physics defying ectoplasmic juice? No.
Precognition might also just be remotely acceptable to me if it was some very indirect, mathematical refinement to social sciences, like psychohistory. But having dreams about my mother dying in a car crash the night before. No. That's just coincidence.
Telekineses or any form of mind over matter is right out. If I wanna set something on fire, I don't just furrow my brow and chant real hard, I just turn a flamethrower on it.
All my examples require an instrumentality of some kind and are based real science that's just remotely possible.
Ectoplasmic psionic juice or The Force is just other words for mana or magic. It's hooey that ruins a modern science fiction story for me.
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@corpore-metal: my point was really that those positions only hold based on what we know now. 300 years ago talking to someone on the other side of the planet without connecting wires would have been fantasy, 200 years ago the same situation would have been science fiction, and 100 years ago it became a reality (dates aproximate).
one century's man's ectoplasmic juice could be another century's man's quantum entanglement.
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@tetracycloide: There's a lot of gray area between occult novels featuring telepathic powers and SF ones... but the SF ones do attempt to offer some kind of scientific (sounding) explanation. Usually the idea is that these powers are already latent in our brains, but we're not sufficiently evolved/advanced (yet) to tap into them. Alien races, lost civilizations, and others, though, have somehow learned to do so.
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@tetracycloide:
Sorry but quantum theory provides no support at all for psychic powers.
All the quantum la-la books that has been touted over the last 30 years where the authors claim that QM supports auras, dowsing and other such nonsense are just arm chair theorists who don't really understand quantum theory.
Of course we could discover some utterly new kind of physics that somehow extends known physics and somehow supports the claims of spirit mediums, Jeane Dixon, Uri Geller and so on then okay. But in over two centuries of looking and decades of parapsychological research we haven't found anything yet.
Now, a real scientist would say lack of evidence is no reason, by itself, to stop looking and I believe parapsychology research should go on. But in my personal opinion, psychic stuff is bunk.
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@corpore-metal: again, that's true now but it may or may not be true in the future which leads to the conclusion that the difference between sci-fi and fantasy is not what's on the pages as much as it's what century the reader is living in.
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@tetracycloide: I think it's unlikely and I prefer not to read stories about it. Stories that have psychic powers may call themselves science fiction, even hard science fiction but I consider them in the genre of fantasy or science fantasy.
Star Wars, superhero comics, even Niven's clever examinations of psychic powers are fun to read but I wouldn't class them as hard SF or even SF.
It's just a personal weirdness of mine. It's why I favor hard SF in the first place.
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