Yes. I just had it in my mind somehow that there were books and movies older than Twilight Zone and Outer Limits - going back into the 50s and 40s - that it was a relatively familiar theme even to me as a science-fiction loving child. However, I'm beginning to think my memory is suspect.
An underlying theme/possibility from TOS?
- Thread starter Wingsley
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^No, I'm sure you're right. Just about anything that appears in film or television science fiction is sure to have been around in prose SF since at least a decade or two earlier.
If we're talking about the idea of humanity evolving into a higher, incorporeal state, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End from 1953 comes to mind. If we're talking about the idea of humans gaining telepathic or telekinetic powers, I just mentioned Jerome Bixby's story, also from 1953, and there are also the telepathic far-future humans of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is a pretty seminal work in terms of depicting future human evolution in science fiction, and dates from 1930.
If we're talking about the idea of humanity evolving into a higher, incorporeal state, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End from 1953 comes to mind. If we're talking about the idea of humans gaining telepathic or telekinetic powers, I just mentioned Jerome Bixby's story, also from 1953, and there are also the telepathic far-future humans of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which is a pretty seminal work in terms of depicting future human evolution in science fiction, and dates from 1930.
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