ABSTRACT
This chapter considers key texts from the period 1945–1955. It deals with James Blish’s Jack of Eagles, which directly reflects the influence of J. B. Rhine’s Extra-Sensory Perception, a book which impressed Campbell to a great extent, and signifies a scientising frame for a range of psi-powers that is unusual in the period. The chapter also considers classic ‘psi’ novels by A. E. Van Vogt before concluding with Theodore Sturgeon. Rather than following a strictly historicist or typological method, the chapter then considers the tension between ‘psi’ as a biological or evolutionary phenomenon and ‘psionic’, telepathy and psychokinesis as a kind of technology. It connects the latter with the growing sense in the 1950s of the deforming pressures of technology and mediation in post-war everyday life and culture, from the work of Norbert Wiener to Marshall McLuhan.
