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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7148383" data-attributes="member: 996">The word itself only goes back to the 50s, it was coined by some science-fiction writer, a portmanteau of 'psi' (the first greek letter in 'pscyhe,' meaning 'mind') + '-onics' from 'electronics.'  (You have to understand that in the 50s, '-onics' was like '.com' in the 90s, it was this buzzword thing that doubled your company's stock valuation if you tacked it on to the end of its name.)  The intent wasn't to sell stock, though, but to convey the idea of psychic powers being trainable and/or technologically augmented - those ideas were already popular thanks to Smith's "Lensmen" pulp sci-fi series (and possibly other stories preceding them I don't know about, but Lensmen was kinda huge).(sci-fi, BTW, also a relatively new term, like wi-fi, a play on 'hi-fi,' which you probably also have never heard of...)Anyway, psionics had been used in sci-fi since before either word was coined (arguably going back to Bulwer-Lytton's 'Coming Race,' maybe even further), as a way of adapting the storytelling-grease that is magic into the fledgling genre.   The idea that supernatural mental powers could somehow not be magic must have started in the Age of Reason, but I'd guess, like pop culture ideas of ghosts and the afterlife, that it was also influenced heavily by Theosophy in the late 19th century. So, in one sense, psionics /is/ magic with the serial numbers filed off.  As far as seeing psionics in the fantasy genre, the line between sci-fi and fantasy has been pretty blurry for a while now.  Fantasy got a pretty bad name at some point, and science-fiction writers were for decades very adamant about the distinction, even when writing things that were obviously fantasy in all but name, planetary romances, for instance, even Star Wars has been accused of being fantasy with a thick veneer of space opera or 'science-fantasy.'  By the same token, there's a lot of overt fantasy that underpins itself with science-fiction instead of magical rationales, so is really science fiction or science-fantasy.  Darkover's the example that comes to my mind, but possibly the 'fantasy' you're thinking of is similar.  What non-RPG fantasy sources do you see psionics in?No.  It's set on an alien planet, threatened by virulent life-forms on another planet with an excentric orbit that brings it into range in a long cycle.  The 'dragons' were bred or genetically engineered from winged lizards native to the planet by human colonists who came there in starships.</blockquote>

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