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"...science fiction is sort of like a sociological genome. It's a huge range of possible futures, most of them useless; some vital. You never really know in advance."
- Peter Watts
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| Overmind | ||
| A consciousness that supersedes the minds of many individuals. |
I wouldn't be surprised if this term derived from Theosophical or other mystical literature of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. However, as far as I know, this is the earliest use of this term in science fiction.
| Captain Rowan laughed. “No?
Then tell me: What if the hand of
a person begins suddenly to write
words at a rate ten to twenty times
faster than normal, in a handwriting
other than his own, upon wise and
lofty subjects not heard of before;
sometimes even in a language of
which the owner of the hand is
ignorant — tell me, what guides that
hand?”
“There is usually fraud back of this automatic writing, deceit of some sort,” replied Parsons. “In the few eases where it seems to be genuine, it is due, doubtless, to the subconscious mind of man.” “But if the person doing the automatic writing has no knowledge, either conscious or subconscious, of Latin or Greek, or even of Sanskrit (for I assure you whole reams have been written in Sanskrit), and the writing should be in any one of those languages—what then ?" Parsons shrugged his shoulders. “Still there is no valid reason for assuming an overmind or director as does Larkin.” He turned to me. “Undoubtedly there are some mysterious things in connection with psychic phenomena which are baffling, but to use those mysterious things as a base from which to launch into wild and irrational speculations is not scientific. |
| Technovelgy from The Chemical Brain,
by Francis Flagg. Published by Weird Tales in 1929 Additional resources -
|
Another early use of this expression can be found in James Schmitz' 1949 novel Agent of Vega:
Many science fiction readers would associate this term with Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 novel Childhood's End, which went so far as to capitalize and deify it:
The Departmental Lab’s theory was that under the stress of a psychic attack which was about to overwhelm the individual telepath, a kind of racial Overmind took over automatically and conducted its member-mind’s escape from the emergency...
There lay the Overmind, whatever it might be, bearing the same relation to man as man bore to the amoeba. Potentially infinite, beyond mortality...
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