I thought that there might have been some evidence for telepathy but checked on Wikipedia (here) and apparently there is none which makes Poul Anderson's persuasive discussion of the limits on telepathy slightly less interesting.
The limits listed by Anderson on p. 287 are:
low rate of data conveyance at the relevant frequencies;
rapid signal degradation;
the coding problem, i.e., different races have different brain-activity patterns and non-telepaths even have individual patterns because there is no shared communication mode as there is with spoken languages.so that a telepath must learn a new "language" for each telepathic race and, an even greater obstacle, for each non-telepathic individual.
Aycharaych transcends these limits. Flandry does not know what to do but:
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I too, somewhat vaguely, thought was some slight evidence for at least a few rare, doubtful cases of telepathy. And I thought the Rhine Institute investigated telepathy. Even if that is not the case, I still found Anderson's rationalizations for how telepathy might or might not work interesting. And not just in the Technic stories but also in stand alone pieces like "Journeys End." Or even the artificial telepathy we see in "Progress."
Yes, "Honorable Enemies" is more about Aline Chang-Lei and how it was she, not Flandry, who outwitted Aycharaych and the Merseians. I have more than once been rather sorry it was not she Flandry eventually married. After all, they seemed ideal for each other in many ways. And it's plain Aline would have wanted that!
Terran women were expected to be "subordinate"? In custom if not in law? Maybe, but compared to how other races, such as the Merseians, treated their females, the "subordination" did not amount to much. I recall how a Merseian in A CIRCUS OF HELLS dismissed human sexual equality as "nonsense."
Ad astra! Sean
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