What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. SF - exiled telepathic society on hostile alien planet, don't notice changes due to shared telepathy, possible short story. [s]
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This is "Cobwebs" by Ray Brown in Analog August 1987 (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?5...). A very memorable story. Someone describes the story here http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-... by the way.
THAT'S IT!Thank you so much!
(please move to Solved, this is definitely the story). Next up - find somewhere to read it again!
Great. Glad to help. The easiest way to reread it would probably be to check a used book store (or online source) for old issues of Analog.
There was a community of people on an alien planet who had been exiled from Earth for being telepaths. The residents of the planet had originally fought back, but now (a number of years into the exile), they were no longer seen again (but they really were still there).
A little boy is born who isn't telepathic, living with his mother in the forest, and they find that when they read his mind that he's seeing reality, whereas the telepaths are seeing a commonly shared reality (that's not well explained). For example, they've commented that they're aging really well, but that's just because they're sending out that mental image of themselves, and others are picking up on it and reinforcing it. One of the characters is revealed to be very skinny, another is red in the face with a pot belly, another had an illness where his/her nose grew longer and nearly meets their chin.
The aliens had been making holes in walkways, for example, that the telepaths didn't see because they knew there wasn't a hole there. The aliens knew about this, and had been killing children who weren't telepathic to avoid detection.
One of the characters compared it to when he was living somewhere and didn't really notice the place, someone new came over and immediately saw all the cobwebs on the ceiling.
Thank you for any assistance!