Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I read this book when I was a teenager (late 70's early 80's) and cannot remember its name or author.
An alien race is discovered, their planet is metal poor so their technology is glass based, they also surgically implant an organ that gives them telepathic ability.
Ring any bells to anyone, what was it called?
Just remembered something about it, the initial Alien that is encountered is adrift in space in some kind of stasis pod, has been for a long time (many years)
This could be Alan Dean Foster's Sentenced to Prism.
It sounds like you're referring to the Tanu from the "Saga of the Pliocene Exiles".
Their tech (and weaponry and armour) is largely based on glass and ceramics as a result of certain metals being extremely poisonous to their allies.
They use a torc (a sort of fancy, thick necklace) to supplement their limited telepathic gifts.
This sounds like Ringworld. I don't know about their planet, but their spaceship that they travel in has a transparent glass hull that can dim in sunlight, and it has a stasis field that protects occupants.
The Puppeteers' General Products hulls, which are impervious to any known force except visible light and gravity, and cannot be destroyed by anything except antimatter. The Slaver stasis field, which causes time in the enclosed volume to stand still; since time has for all intents and purposes ceased for an object in stasis, no harm can come to anything within the field.
One of the characters is Kzin which are telepathic.
the ones who exhibit telepathic ability are forced into addiction of a drug derived from the lymph of an animal called a sthondat. Sthondat lymph extract significantly increases telepathic ability
