telepathy | Futures Past and Present

“Three Blind Mice”
Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1945, as by Lewis Padgett

This story takes place about a generation, maybe two, after the events of the first story, “The Piper’s Son”. The stories in this series present the highlights of the history of the Baldies for the first two hundred and fifty or so years after their mutation brought them forth. As in the last post, there will be spoiler below the READ MORE link.

David Barton is a big game hunter who captures animals and brings them back to North America (the US no longer exists as we would recognize it) for various zoos. It’s how he has managed to adjust and adapt to his mutation. He’s channeled is aggressiveness into something product, an accomplish necessary for a Baldy to survive.

The story opens with him bringing a load of animals to a town in the rocky mountains. He’s flying in, looking forward to having catfish at a restaurant he knows, when he’s contacted telepathically by a woman he’s not met before. Her name is Sue Connaught, and she wants to meet him in person. Continue reading →

“The Piper’s Son”
Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, Feb. 1945

Henry Kuttner wrote a series of stories in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore about a race of telepathic mutants called Baldies. This series consisted of five novelettes and ran under the Lewis Padgett byline in Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s. This post will look at the first of them. I’ll look at the rest every Friday and Tuesday until I’ve covered the entire series and the fix-up novel containing them all.

First a bit of backstory. The setting is about one generation, maybe two, after a nuclear war. Chicago, among other cities, was destroyed. There are strict limits on how large a municipality can grow. Any town that gets too large is destroyed.

The radiation blast created a number of mutants. Among them are a race of hairless telepaths known as Baldies. They wear wigs and do their best to blend into society. Understandably, they’re feared and hated by a large segment of the population. Continue reading →

Futures Past and Present

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Tag Archives: telepathy

Kuttner’s Baldy Series: “Three Blind Mice”

Kuttner’s Baldy Series: “The Piper’s Son”