PSYCHOKINESIS
;
Suddenly unimaginable chaos erupts as fierce winds hurl everything
into the air at 1,000 miles per hour, the rotation rate of the Earth. All of
humanity is swept away into outer space. In desperation, he makes his
last and final wish: to return everything to the way it was.
This is the story line of the movie The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), based on the 1911 short story by H. G. Wells. (It would
later be readapted into the movie Bruce Almighty, starring Jim Carrey.)
Of all the powers ascribed to ESP, psychokinesis-or mind over matter,
or the ability to move objects by thinking about them-is by far the most
powerful, essentially the power of a deity. The point made by Wells in
his short story is that godlike powers also require godlike judgment
and wisdom.
Psychokinesis figures prominently in literature, especially in the
Shakespearean play The Tempest, where the sorcerer Prospero, his
daughter Miranda, and the magical sprite Ariel are stranded for years
on a deserted island due to the treachery of Prospero's evil brother.
When Prospero learns that his evil brother is sailing on a boat in his
vicinity, in revenge Prospero summons his psychokinetic power and
conjures up a monstrous storm, causing his evil brother's ship to crash
onto the island. Prospero then uses his psychokinetic powers to manipulate the fate of the hapless survivors, including Ferdinand, an innocent, handsome youth, whom Prospero engineers into a love match
with Miranda.
(The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov noted that The Tempest
bears striking similarity to a science fiction tale. In fact, about 350
years after it was written, The Tempest was remade into a 1956 science
fiction classic called Forbidden Planet, in which Prospero becomes the
brooding scientist Morbius, the sprite becomes Robby the Robot, Miranda becomes Morbius's beautiful daughter Altaira, and the island
becomes the planet Altair-4. Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star
Trek series, acknowledged that Forbidden Planet was one of the inspirations for his TV series.)
More recently psychokinesis was the central plot idea behind the
novel Carrie (1974), by Stephen Ring, which propelled an unknown,
poverty-stricken writer into the world's number one writer of horror
;
Suddenly unimaginable chaos erupts as fierce winds hurl everything
into the air at 1,000 miles per hour, the rotation rate of the Earth. All of
humanity is swept away into outer space. In desperation, he makes his
last and final wish: to return everything to the way it was.
This is the story line of the movie The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), based on the 1911 short story by H. G. Wells. (It would
later be readapted into the movie Bruce Almighty, starring Jim Carrey.)
Of all the powers ascribed to ESP, psychokinesis-or mind over matter,
or the ability to move objects by thinking about them-is by far the most
powerful, essentially the power of a deity. The point made by Wells in
his short story is that godlike powers also require godlike judgment
and wisdom.
Psychokinesis figures prominently in literature, especially in the
Shakespearean play The Tempest, where the sorcerer Prospero, his
daughter Miranda, and the magical sprite Ariel are stranded for years
on a deserted island due to the treachery of Prospero's evil brother.
When Prospero learns that his evil brother is sailing on a boat in his
vicinity, in revenge Prospero summons his psychokinetic power and
conjures up a monstrous storm, causing his evil brother's ship to crash
onto the island. Prospero then uses his psychokinetic powers to manipulate the fate of the hapless survivors, including Ferdinand, an innocent, handsome youth, whom Prospero engineers into a love match
with Miranda.
(The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov noted that The Tempest
bears striking similarity to a science fiction tale. In fact, about 350
years after it was written, The Tempest was remade into a 1956 science
fiction classic called Forbidden Planet, in which Prospero becomes the
brooding scientist Morbius, the sprite becomes Robby the Robot, Miranda becomes Morbius's beautiful daughter Altaira, and the island
becomes the planet Altair-4. Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star
Trek series, acknowledged that Forbidden Planet was one of the inspirations for his TV series.)
More recently psychokinesis was the central plot idea behind the
novel Carrie (1974), by Stephen Ring, which propelled an unknown,
poverty-stricken writer into the world's number one writer of horror