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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mordhau" data-source="post: 8513389" data-attributes="member: 7032137">There is no hardline between magic and psionics, especially now that there is very little real belief in psychic powers and phenomena.But there are a whole lot of little overlapping textual games going on.You can get away with a little bit of mild psychic abilty in all kinds of media without the whole thing being taken as fantasy.  Dreams of a loved one being in danger, or the psychic that happens to predict the future being two typical examples, while the viewer/reader may not believe in these things, they probably know people who do, so it doesn't seem too foreign (and could always be explained by coincidence anyway).Then there's something like Dune that goes a little further and takes the above kind of phenomenom and extrapolates it as something that could be developed over time through eugenics.  We're not quite in the realm of hard SF anymore, but it's still somewhat harder than outright fantasy.There's also the game that doesn't get played much anymore, where you take a space colony have it lose track of it's history through disaster and then reach medieval tech again, except some people have magic, which is really psychic phenomena.  This has fallen out of favour probably because a big part of the point of it is that is should feel more grounded and believable than straight fantasy, and that doesn't really work any more.  However, if we want to reference this old subgenre (like say in Dark Sun) we need to look back to the way it presented itself in terms of psionics.And then there is psionics, as someone pointed out earlier in the thread, that is linked to real world spiritualist movements as well as religious stories such as levitating yogis and the like.  While most people probably don't believe this, it is at least linked to what some people in the real world believe and is therefore less of a stretch than completely made up fantasy powers.And then there is psionics in space opera that has totally abandoned any real pretense to future plausibility and is just playing with the tropes of the genre for it's own purposes.  In such a case you may just call your magic psionics for the same reason that you call your monsters aliens - because it seems more in genre.</blockquote>

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