#telepathy

#telepathy

In many ways, the 1990s space opera was a kind of Rosetta Stone of various science fiction that had come before. Showrunner and creator J. Michael Straczynski baked various genre references into the series, including old-school sci-fi novels like The Demolished Man, to various nominative shout-outs to The Lord of the Rings. But with the introduction of one space drug called "Dust," Babylon 5 seemed to reference , at least in a roundabout way.

The notion of honesty, or the lack thereof, is, when you stop to think about it, a uniquely human concept. Few animals are capable of true deception, making the human capacity for lying one of our most dangerous features. Science fiction loves exploring this concept, especially when it comes to concepts of telepathy. In Alfred Bester's 1953 classic novel, The Demolished Man (and the first novel to ever win a Hugo award), a world of telepathy makes premeditated crime impossible.