I've been doing some reading lately, and I've noticed that a lot of science fiction works from the early to mid 20th century will combine lots of technological oddities that are (ostensibly) easily-explained as simple advancement of science, while also including some element of extrasensory powers in humans or other lifeforms (ESP, telekinesis, etc), powers that, more often than not, are explicitly described as originating from a natural, biological source, despite such a thing being considered utter fantasy today. (For example, "Dune", Asimov's "The Foundation Series", "The City and the Stars", even Star Wars). What were, if any, the contemporary scientific bases that led so many authors to consider such fantastical abilities to be in the same realm as, say, your average spaceship or laser?
didn't know exactly where to post this, but I'm hoping someone here has a decent answer.
This thread is bugging out on my phone, but on the off chance it’s still live... here we go: — Science fiction is my forte. I write it professionally, eat it, breathe it, sleep with it when I’m drunk, you get the idea. While I’m not the world’s leading expert, I think your question is worth a lengthy, semi-snobbish answer.
Science-fantasy, hard science-fiction, and fiction in a scientific setting—all of these rely on the same mechanics. The author needs parameters, and those parameters need exceptions. Ideally, these exceptions to the story’s rules will have an exponential effect, expanding the writer’s efforts to build the mythos of their setting, using their reader’s minds as an engine to make that happen.
Let’s break it down further. Biological superhuman abilities (specifically the power to influence the world with thought) adjust the agency of any given character. If our protagonist CAN move things with their mind, but chooses not to... their needs to be a reason. Not providing the reader with this reason may be enough to trigger the reader to come up with their own supposition as to why. This could, potentially, make a story beat MORE thought-provoking to the reader, who might read the passage and wonder what they would have done with such powers at their disposal. This is due to the expanded sphere of influence surrounding our protagonist, whether they can control that sphere effectively or not.
So, why did the science fiction authors of the Golden and Contemporary Eras use mind powers as often as they did? Part of the answer to this lay in the American generation gap of the 1950’s and 1960’s, when children were questioning the way their parents thought. After all, those who think differently can change their entire outlook, and thereby change the world. All you need is... Love? Try telekinesis. Try telepathy, a way to both read and impart the inner working of the mind to someone who is inaccessible and closed off. America and the USSR were so different from each other, but both societies were dealing with fundamental shifts in their philosophical makeup in the 20th century (arguably much moreso than they are today), and this was felt nowhere more acutely than between fathers and sons. Fathers conformed. They were proud of this conformity. Sons tended to branch off, and they did so because MINDsets were changing. In other words, there was a real sense of progress through the combination of youth and radical thought. Brains were changing, and it wasn’t happening in dusty old studies. It was happening in colleges, where the future was limitless.
The second (and final) part of my answer lay deep in 20th century superstitions. Computers were mysterious. They were beginning to handle tasks meant for the human mind, and an entire generation of young people were beginning to wonder why they had competed against the Russians/Americans in an academic setting, only to have those skills co-opted by ever-shrinking machines. Did the Russians have better thinking-machines? Would thinking machines take over the world? What if they came from space? If machines stop obeying us and we go to war with the Russians, what do we do?
Enter: the Spiritualist Movement of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. People wanted to talk to their dead loved ones in droves, and mediums could be found in popular magazines and shop corners. Psychics were on Johnny Carson, and more than a few supernatural experiments were being leaked from both sides of the Red Curtain. This built a buzz around mind powers, both for entertainment and for soul searching. Conspiracy being what it is, there was virtually zero pause between sensationalized fortune tellers and cutting edge fiction. The whole thing seemed so damned probable, and it was a way for pulp authors to put a new face on old stories.
Instead of Uz, the Aztec warrior who could shoot arrows supernaturally, a character from Starship Troopers could throw an ashtray through a bug brain (and comment on Fascism at the same time). Suspension of disbelief had thrown a bone to writers of Weird and Strange Fiction, and they rolled with it when they needed a rules-free moment to grease their story’s wheels.
Bleh... that’s my take, anyway