There's a cool idea for some OCs in here somewhere...
one of the Moments of jane eyre is when jane is conflicted about st john rivers' offer and calls for a sign from god about what she should do and then she fucking hears mr. rochester calling for her in her head and immediately makes up her mind to Go To Him after a year and says she's coming and asks where he is and a while after she reunites with him he goes "oh yeah one time a little bit ago I was so anguished that i cried out your name and I actually heard you answer back. you said you were coming and asked where i was. crazy how that happened because it's not like you could have actually heard me or anything" and then she just tells The Reader that she knows that somehow she Really Was Answering Him but then she also goes "...y'know what I don't think he can handle that information right now so i'm just gonna keep that to myself" and then it's just never fucking brought up again
Imagine u are the planet earth and u have sprouted all these little hominids to give u information about yourself* (*none of my business why we exist but i assume it's something along these lines) and it was going great for a while but now every time u ask them telepathically MONKEYS WHAT AM I? WHAT IS THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW? all the monkeys think of the same very good photo of u taken in 1972
i'd be like girl thank you but that is a PHOTOGRAPH. i am asking what is the PLACE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES
Telepathic aliens enjoy that humans will "play music" for hours at a time. When it's too mentally quiet on deck, they just announce the catchiest song titles they know and the humans will start thinking about it automatically.
The humans hate this so, so much.
Zorf: Human Steve, can you please play that song I like, the one with all the females
Steve: what
Zorf: A little bit of Monica in my life
Steve:
Steve: mother fu--
Get ready for ten years of nothing but the Piña Colada song.
cant stop thinking about this comment
anyone else get embarrassed when their self indulgent daydreams are like too self-indulgent? like oh jeez the telepaths are going to judge me
Sentences that explain like 70% of America
(via @xaveria)
if we could read minds I still don’t think we’d understand them.
like I’ve spoken to people who think in images, who have to translate each thought into words before they communicate. and I think entirely in words, laid out across the void inside my head. my father’s thinking is 3d, concepts structured in ways that are incredibly difficult to translate into words. and how would that look to me, if I could see into it? how do I perceive a thought that my mind cannot contain by the nature of their construction?
we all speak a private language to ourselves and we are always translating so we can speak to each other…don’t touch me I’m emotional
So I would like to give a shout-out to one of my favorite books, Rider at the Gate by C.J. Cherryh, and its sequel, Cloud’s Rider. I’ve never met anyone else who has read this series, which is a shame because it is awesome.
Okay. So lots of books have telepathic animals that can communicate with humans, right? Friendly, happy, affectionate animals. Rider at the Gate takes the idea of telepathy and imagines an entire planetary ecosystem based around it. So different animal species use telepathy for various things, with varying degrees of sophistication: to attract mates, to make themselves look bigger than they really are, or to make you think they’re not there so you won’t eat them or so they can eat you. This is brilliant, and I’ve never seen any other books with this premise - and if there are, I need to read them ASAP.
Needless to say, when human colonists show up on this planet full of telepathic animals projecting images into their minds so they can scare/confuse/eat them, they are toast.
Happily for humanity, though, one of the apex predator species - nighthorses - are curious enough to investigate, and decide they like how human minds “feel” enough to bond with individual humans and keep the other telepathic animals away. So humanity can actually colonize the planet, as long as they have “riders” ringing their towns, protecting their poor defenseless livestock, and guarding their convoys between towns. Most unbonded humans are really freaked out by telepathy, and their attitudes towards riders range from grudging respect to the more fundamentalist “riders are devilspawn, stay away” (which amounts to an entire religion, actually).
Add this to the fact that the planet is basically Alaska - short but intense growing season; long severe winters; lots of forests and mining resources - and electricity and tech are either unreliable or summon giant telepathic man-eating bears, and you’ve got yourself one hell of a setting. Basically, everything on this planet is trying to kill humanity, life is a grim frontier setting, and despite some good people trying to do the right things (particularly in book two) it’s hella dark. Frankly, I read this book as a masterpiece of world building, because most of the details are subtle and in the background rather than explained all at once in a big prologue.
The nighthorses have their own personalities and agendas, that don’t always coincide with the human ones. You can ride them, but they get tired easily, so mostly you walk, and they don’t plan/think in the future super-well without a human mind to steady them. Also, they look kinda like horses, but they’re predators - they kill fish and small mammals easily, and they love bacon. We all love the idea of bonding with an intelligent nonhuman animal, but we always expect it to be like the Companions in the Valdemar books (who are actually reincarnated people in horse bodies, not actual horses). This is what it actually would be like: occasionally awesome and convenient, but sometimes so damn frustrating.
Also, Cherryh writes telepathy really well. It’s confusing until you get used to it - it took me several read-throughs to really process how everything fits together, like an intricate puzzle-box. Part of the problem is that telepathy lends itself to rumor-mongering like you wouldn’t believe, and so it’s challening at first to figure out what’s actually happening versus what characters are imagining or are afraid of happening. I’ve never seen any other writer use that mix of images and words for telepathy, or set up her sentences so that she can write a descriptive sentence and the reader knows exactly what’s meant to be telepathic images and what’s not.
Another thing I love about this book is that there are no real villains. I can’t really say much more without HUGE SPOILERS and y'all should just go and read these books for yourselves, but there’s no one in these books who I would consider to be evil in the usual literary dualistic sense. Stupid, selfish, short-sighted, confused, lying to save their skins, deluded, worried about what other people think, etc, etc, but never evil in the sense of Voldemort or Sauron. It’s a very realistic-feeling human kind of evil, the sort you can identify with on some level.
Terrible things happen, but even the primary antagonist (who is probably an undiagnosed sociopath and/or affected by their parents’ abuse, and definitely kills a lot of people in horrific ways because they’re mad about petty things) believes themselves to be a good person and that life just isn’t treating them fairly. For them, it’s an opportunity to enact their childish fantasies of power and privilege, and it’s a game without real consequences. What they really want is so relatable on some level that it’s hard (for me, anyway) to unequivocally hate them, even though the means they choose to enact those desires are awful. Ironically, this very refusal to believe that this person is problematic - because they look so harmless and they don’t match the other characters’ idea of evil - ends up causing the bulk of the problems in the two books, even after they should know better.
It’s rare for me to find any genre fiction that is this psychologically, physically and ecologically real, or any “realistic” fiction with such an interesting premise and characters. I wish Cherryh had written more books in this universe, but I’m happy that this pair exists.
Rider at the Gate and Cloud’s rider may be the most interesting world building I’ve ever read. It’s so disappointing that there were only 2 of them
I KNOW, RIGHT? But Cherryh did write a sequel to Cyteen decades after the fact, so perhaps we might get another Nighthorse novel someday. I live in hope.
I read these books! It’s been years and years since I read them. (noooo, my library doesn’t have them anymore!)
But, speaking of telepathic animals that aren’t as cheerfully helpful as Companions - the Pit Dragon Trilogy by Jane Yolen takes place on Space Australia, a desert-heavy planet where convicts and guards were sent down. There are some different psychic animals, though not as many or as powerful as on the nighthorse world. The largest and most psychic are dragons, which are bred on farms to be food, stunted as pets, or raised for bloodsports. They ‘send’ colors into the minds of the people around them.
The second and third books start leaning more into the idea that the dragons are more intelligent than people are giving them credit for, if strange. There’s a real hard stance on them not being rideable for physiological reasons. Even a good handler with a good dragon has things a little dicey trying to get them to do unusual things.
Yolen wrote a fourth book eighteen years later but uh… It was bad. I don’t think she reread her older books? It comes down strictly on “dragons are just animals” and it’s cool to eat them again, takes the male lead setting a bootlicker free as a favor between them rather than the punishment it was, pretends no one knew the dragons had weird powers and oh no the things evil people could learn to do with them!!, and the female lead is damseled and has way less agency than in the rest of the trilogy.
YEAH WHAT THE FUCK that fourth book is why I only have the FIRST one on my shelves, when otherwise I might have two or three? Fuck that fourth book.
empathy is a kind of telepathy. so is writing
