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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7055350" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's possible that it is both, as the term has been widely misunderstood and widely misused since it was introduced.  However, when introduced by its creator, the term meant a 'psychic amplifier' that would increase natural psychic ability to the point it would reliable.  The idea of a helmet that would receive your psychic emanations and would then electronically amplify them was actually a fairly big idea among scientific quacks right up into the 1950's.  The most famous use of this trope is in the first 'Back to the Future' film, Dr. Brown of the 1950's is introduced as a crackpot testing out a psionic amplifier that would allow him to read people's thoughts.Psychic is a term invented in the wake of the explosive success of science in explaining the world in the late 19th and early 20th century.  It essentially means 'magic', and all the traditional claims by traditional magicians tend to fall into the sphere claimed by 'psychic'.   The difference is that all the language has been dressed up in Latin and Greek to give it a pseudo-scientific veneer of legitimacy - 'telepathy', 'precognition', 'telekinesis', etc.   Some of this was just fortune teller quackery - people knew the marks were more likely to keep believing if you made it sound like science.   Some of this was well educated true believers not wanting to give up on the idea that humans had magic powers, and some of that feeds into some surprising places.   For example, consider how many 'hard' science fiction authors (Author C. Clarke for one, Iain M. Banks for another),  postulate far future transcendence (in almost every book) that finally fulfills the dream of magic by way of gnostic sciences currently unknown to man.  Or look at the Kurzwellian's with the secular eschatology of the singularity, or Carl Sagan and his manifest destiny and humanist historicism.  All of that is modern magical thinking in in a pseudo-scientific veneer.   Because 'science' or something.And of course it shows up a lot in 'science fiction', where writers really want to write fantasy - complete with wizards and magical swords - but they give those things scientific sounding names or names with less obviously magical baggage.   Oh sure.  But I was trying to highlight that Bab5 for example has 'Techno-Wizards', and veritable angels and demons dressed in science-y language, and that really it was all magic.   And to the extent that 'Psionic' isn't magic (cloud networked human minds might really be a possibility), it probably isn't a good fit for a typical fantasy.</blockquote>

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