From the first page of the first book, Star Time, psychic abilities are introduced. Rather than a fantasy setting where anything and everything is possible, I’ve concentrated on a set of abilities that roughly follow the categories documented in the Duke University research.
There is telepathy, where a person can sense the thoughts of others. This is a receive-only skill. I am not including any projection-type thought communication.
There is clairvoyance. This is the ability to sense, to see things not obvious to the eyes. Persons can sense at a distance, or sense under the surface.
There is precognition. While this is officially the ability to sense the future, as I understand it, it is more like having telepathy and clairvoyance unbound by time. In other words, one could see into the future or past, and potentially listen to thoughts from other times as well.
And finally, there is psychokinesis, the ability to move objects by force of thought alone. In these books, it is never large dramatic motion, rather it is little things, like manipulating a lock or triggering an electric circuit, and more importantly, influencing biological processes.
For the purposes of these books, psychic abilities are presumed to be inherited. This gives me the opportunity to examine a big puzzle:
If psychic abilities are inheritable, then why hasn’t the whole human race become telepaths? If these gifts enable people to do more than normal, then wouldn’t that be a significant evolutionary advantage? Thus over generations, everyone should be psychic.
Obviously, there have to be confounding side effects—ones so significant that reported psychic individuals are rare.
Sharon, the female lead character in Star Time, was raised as a hermit by her gifted mother because a born telepath can’t become an individual if swamped by the thoughts of others. Telepathy is a birth defect that ordinarily prevents an infant from developing a self.
The techniques used by Sharon’s mother to isolate and protect her child are enhanced by developments in the U’tanse Branch books. It seems that telepathy isn’t a human-only thing. Human telepaths can sense animal thoughts and more intelligent alien species can also have telepathy as well. Sharon discovers that the Cerik who kidnapped her and Abe have a telepathy-blocking skill called ineda. This allows a person, telepath or not, to hide and obscure their own thoughts.
Sharon uses her mother’s techniques with the ineda she learned from the Cerik to enable her descendants to be born and to develop as normal individuals.
The U’tanse branch of humanity is shaped by this. The nuclear family structure is broken. Children have to be raised in nurseries by ineda-blocked caregivers. With a very open society, no part of life is secret, including sex and reproduction. Because of the widespread telepathy, everyone from an early age learned that hurting another caused instant backlash, so people were naturally pacifists.
Also, since the Cerik had telepaths of their own, it was extremely difficult for any kind of slave resistance to be raised among the U’tanse.
The last danger of psychic abilities was the risk of creating a hive mind. It was discovered that when a group of slave humans lost all hope, they sometimes sought refuge in losing their identity in the minds of others. When it became severe, the unified minds acted to protect itself from any effort to separate them. They were “hivers”, willing to use their combined psychic skills to forcibly recruit independent minds into their hive, and able to use force to battle anyone who threatened the hive.
Even in the last section of the saga, where the U’tanse rediscover the Solar system and work toward the reunification of humanity, their own psychic abilities must be hidden from mainline humanity to avoid being considered a threat.
In Star Time and Kingdom of the Hill Country Ed, a relative of Sharon with a gift of precognition, struggles to live with frequent glimpses into the future. I had observed in my own research that precognition often comes with psychological restrictions and I used that in these stories. Ed’s visions are reliable, but he can’t see his own future. As a person with a rigid future coming at him, the best he can do is alter the side-effects that haven’t been spelled out in his visions.