This post may include spoilers about the newest season of Doctor Who. If you don't want to read these spoilers, I suggest skipping this part.



I've been trying to keep up with the current season of Doctor Who which is being shown in Britain. So far, every episode has been impressive. I am rather irritated, however, that the last episode aired (the one aired yesterday) ended on a cliffhanger for the second week in a row.



Spoilers End Here.



In watching science fiction of late, I have come to notice an odd feature common to many different settings--Psionics. Psychic powers in sci-fi seem generally to represent the magic of the future. This, I find sort of odd considering that one could just as easilly attribute such things to highly advanced technology. Often times, it seems that psionics are introduced to add a person or group who is just slightly ahead of the curve compared to most of society (you see this in Babylon 5 and Star Trek). But in other settings, it seems like there is little reason to introduce the idea of psychic powers due to the already high-tech setting (this is most notable in Doctor Who). In the latter of these kinds of settings, psionics become the catch-all excuse for lazy writers who don't want to explain plot devices.



Don't take my being harsh on Doctor Who as my thinking that psionics are a good thing to include in sci-fi. I think that psionics are a cop-out for what is essentially the "magic of the future." Unfortunately, I doubt that psionics in sci-fi are going to go anywhere as they represent too easy an explaination for writers. Maybe those writers should go back to fantasy writing where magic is a conceit of the universe rather than grafting it onto sci-fi as psionics. Writers could also take the very reasonable stance of just allowing for straight up magic and calling it as such. Some sci-fi universes allow for a techno-magical future to considerable success (Shadowrun comes to mind here, though there are undoubtably others).



Published by XPost