70s (or earlier) book about telepathic or psychic young people, one of them unwilling to accept their powers

Question

Here’s the little I can recall from this book I read in the early 1970s:

• It involved psychic, or perhaps telepathic, young people (I don’t think they were children, maybe more like teenagers, though I can’t be sure).
• I’m inclined to remark that one of the main characters was a little reticent or unwilling to accept his (or her) powers or attributes.
• It took the involvement of others with similar powers to have the main character accept how things were.
• I think the ending involved one of the main characters being persuaded to join the others in some sort of group, or common endeavour (this is just a very vague recollection).
• It took place in a fairly ordinary, everyday setting.

Answer 1

Possibly The Chrysalids (also called Re-birth) by John Wyndham (1955). The setting is a small settlement in Labrador some centuries after a nuclear apocalypse; the survivors rigorously weed out any mutation. The narrator, David Strorm, discovers to his chagrin that he himself is a mutant with the ability to communicate from miles away with other children who act as a support group. When they are discovered, the persecution begins and the group tries to gather and escape. For more information, see the Wikipedia article here. And here is a list of editions.

Answer 2

The Golden People by Fred Saberhagen. Several gifted children and one ungifted child live and school together at a professor's home. It turns out the ungifted child was gifted but never told (as a control group).

'In secret laboratories far from Earth he used his powers to create 100 genetically perfect children'

Ray Kedro at 14 is a competent brawler and protects Adam Mann, an esper, from a bunch of esper-phobic bullies. He becomes friends with Adam Mann and his 98 friends, who all have some kind of ESP ability. They eventually all investigate an alien technology on another planet and Ray is informed he is one of the 100 genetically adapted children and two of his 'siblings' begin helping develop his skill.

Available on the Internet Archives: The Golden People : Saberhagen

Answer 3

Could this be The Tomorrow People? It was a 1970s TV show, but there were novelisations.

All incarnations of the show concerned the emergence of the next stage of human evolution (Homo novis) known colloquially as Tomorrow People. Born to human parents, an apparently normal child might at some point between childhood and late adolescence experience a process called 'breaking out' and develop special paranormal abilities. These abilities include psionic powers such as telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation. However, their psychological make-up prevents them from intentionally killing others.

Answer 4

This isn't a perfect match, but since you're pretty vague about some aspects - only thing I could think of was Escape to Witch Mountain (1968).

Young, telepathy and other psychic powers. Eventually meet up with others of their own kind.

Subsequent movies made it fairly well-known.

Answer 5

Possibly "More Than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon, stories about groups of psionic children coming together to form new gestalt entities, like fingers are parts of a hand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Than_Human

Answer 6

I think it might be 'To Ride Pegasus' or 'Get Off The Unicorn' by Anne McCaffrey. These books include stories about the early years of the 'Talents'.

Quote Wikipedia

To Ride Pegasus originates the fictional premise of the Talents universe, the setting for seven novels published 1990 to 2000: two more "Pegasus" books and five "Tower and Hive" books. All eight books feature so-called Talents, people with psionic powers such as empathy, telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, and the ability to find what is lost ('finders').

Pegasus is a symbol for Talent, early adopted by Henry Darrow: "You'd see a lot from the > back of a winged horse ..." (p. 11). "When you ride the winged horse, you can't dismount. ... We'll find our bridle, I think, with time and training and more practice at riding"

The main characters set up an institution that helps and protects 'Talents' with legal aid, salaries, housing etc. on a main campus and in the community.

Answer 7

As you may have guessed by now, considering that nine other answers have already been offered, what you're describing is a common premise in novels of speculative fiction: The story of a young person who has, either consciously or subconsciously, blocked/suppressed/hidden-from-others/whatever his (or her) strong psychic potential, for one reason or another -- such as the fear of being burnt at the stake as a witch -- but who ultimately ends up learning to make good use of telepathy and/or other "psychic powers." But there was one old science fiction novel in particular which sprang into my mind first when I was reading your post, and I see it hasn't been mentioned in any of the previous answers you've received, so I'm going to take the plunge! (If this doesn't work, I may have to reexamine some of the candidates which popped into my head a bit later on.)

Pstalemate, by Lester del Rey. First published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 1971. (Which matches nicely with your recollection of running across this story in the early 1970s, when it would have been a new arrival in bookstores and libraries.) I checked out a copy from a library, somewhere around the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Here's a cover-scan from what was apparently the first edition. It might ring a bell in your memory? (There were other editions later, with various other cover illustrations, but I'm not going to cram them all into this post.)

Partially from memory, and partially from online resources to assist my memory, I will give a quick summary of the plot -- mainly how it is set up in the first few chapters -- to illustrate how this story matches pretty well with the points you listed.

1. I don't recall any exact dates being given, but the book seems to be set in what was "modern times" when it was written. In other words, somewhere in the USA, with appropriate technology and social customs from around the late 60s/early 70s. (Therefore, no "futuristic" technology was in common use that didn't yet exist in reality, such as flying automobiles, or interstellar spaceships, or even everybody having a personal smartphone in his or her pocket.) That matches with your recollection of what would have been an "ordinary, everyday setting" at the time you read it.

2. The protagonist is Harry Bronson, a sincere young mechanical engineer. Early in the book, he is persuaded to let an old friend at a relaxed social gathering test him for telepathic ability. Nothing fancy; the friend (Dr. Lawson) will just go through a deck of cards, one at a time, holding each one so that he and at least one other witness can see what the card is, but Harry can't, and asking Harry to name whatever card he thinks is currently showing. They keep written notes. On the first run-through, Harry says whatever guess pops into his head for each card, and after they've gone through an entire deck, he is told his score was a big fat zero -- he didn't get a single one right!

3. Harry is not heartbroken by that result. He humorously suggests that this means he is one of the least psychic people alive, or words to that effect. Dr. Lawson argues the point, claiming that total failure is just as significant as a perfect success rate would have been. If Harry were making a long series of purely random guesses, he should have gotten at least a couple of 'em right by the law of averages -- and the fact that he didn't is strong evidence that Harry has considerable psychic potential, and something in his brain is subconsciously refusing to let him make a correct "guess" about any of those cards, for fear of what might happen! (In other words, if a correct "guess" started to creep into his head on a psychic wavelength, his subconscious supposedly stifled that thought in a hurry and substituted a guaranteed-to-be-wrong "guess" instead, which would be what Harry ended up voicing at the time.)

4. Harry finds that argument less than totally persuasive (and I'm not saying I blame him), but Dr. Lawson hypnotizes him to try to overcome the alleged subconscious block, and then they test Harry again, on a double deck of playing cards (apparently including 2 Jokers per deck, for a grand total of 108 cards in a row, according to one reviewer).

5. This time, Harry finds himself visualizing a card each time, and writes down what he "sees" in his mind's eye, and when he's done, he is told that he got a perfect score --- 108 matches out of a possible 108, which is so incredibly unlikely to happen by sheer chance that it's not even worth considering the possibility that nothing more than a statistical anomaly was happening here. (Again, all this is according to Dr. Lawson, who seems to have a secret personal agenda here, as I noticed when I was first reading the book.) Harry finds himself feeling terrified by this discovery and the implications, although he is not sure why.

6. As he tries to go about his everyday life, he keeps experiencing more and more evidence that he is now an "unblocked" functioning telepath whose brain is learning how to do things it never did before (not that he can recall, anyway). He touches base with a girl named Ellen whom he hadn't seen in a long time. It gradually becomes clear that Ellen is also telepathic, and that other telepaths exist in the world (including Harry's mother and also one of Ellen's parents -- each of these two young people apparently had inherited the talent), but you don't run into functioning telepaths very often because full-fledged telepathy has this nasty habit of driving the possessor totally insane. Harry's long-lost mother, for instance, is still locked up in an asylum, and has been for many years, ever since she set the house on fire when Harry was a ten-year-old boy, nearly killing him. Other telepaths either go totally psychotic or commit suicide or otherwise are removed from general circulation. From online reviews, I get the impression this usually happens by around age 30 or thereabouts. (I can't remember if an average age was stated in the book.)

7. Just in case Harry didn't have enough to worry about yet, the author allows him to start noticing he also has a precognitive power which gives him glimpses of himself having psychotic hallucinations or something along those lines -- about three months in the future. This gives him a hard-and-fast deadline for trying to figure out a way to avoid the descent into madness which his mother and various other telepaths have suffered. (Ellen isn't feeling all that mentally stable, either. Meanwhile, the two of them appear to be falling in love.)

8. I don't fully remember the details of the novel's climax (although some online resources helped remind me), but there does seem to be a happy ending for Harry and Ellen. I won't ruin such details as I remembered and/or have found by Googling; I'll just say that while I found much of this book to be very depressing when I read it, many years ago, I found some comfort in the thought that the protagonist and his girlfriend were apparently going to "break the cycle" by staying sane for many years to come while raising children. (They either had married, or were planning to marry, by the end of the novel.)

If that description, or any substantial portion of it, stirs up some old memories in your head, then we're probably talking about the same novel. In case you decide you want to read or reread it to check, I did a little Googling. Pstalemate does not appear to have had any English-language reprint editions since the 1980s, and a little poking around on Amazon indicates that no one has bothered to put together an official Kindle edition yet, but the good news is that if you want to read a second-hand copy of this and see if it matches up with your vague memories from the 1970s, it won't cost you very much to satisfy your curiosity.

Amazon currently has used mass-market paperback copies available (mostly from other vendors) for as little as USD $1.99 plus shipping & handling, or USD $5.89 (and up) if you want the shipping & handling costs to be included in the basic price you pay. (Either way, there are likely to be additional sales taxes, but I don't know if yours would be the same as what shows up on my own screen when I look at the options, so I won't try to predict them for you. I also don't know if you currently reside in the USA -- if not, the shipping costs might go up, or you might want to order from a different version of Amazon, or some other book-selling website based in another part of the world, instead of using Amazon.com?)

Answer 8

It could be very well be the Cat series with the eponymous character, a young psychic, as the main role.

This is from Joan D. Vinge, and the first title is Psion (1982): Cat, a street kid, is arrested and given a choice: he can submit to training to develop his latent psychic abilities, or he can be shipped offworld as an indentured laborer. Although he doesn't really believe he could be anything special, Cat chooses to take part in the training, and is swiftly drawn into a world of interplanetary intrigue.

I think this fits the

• Young main protagonist

• Discovering his talents

• Reluctant to use them

Can you have a look?

EDIT: I re-read the question and the OP read the book ealry 70's, which does NOT fit with PSION. But still an interesting read.

Answer 9

I was going to suggest Julian May's "The Saga of Pliocene Exile", it started in '81.

Answer 10

I think it is The Gift by Ursula K Le Guin.

It is the first book in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy. The story is set in a fictional world, in a barren and poverty-stricken region called the Uplands, some of whose inhabitants have hereditary magical gifts. The story follows the narrator Orrec, son of the leader of the domain of Caspromant, whose hereditary gift is the ability to "unmake", and Gry, the daughter of a neighboring domain, who can communicate with animals. Orrec's gift manifests late, and seems uncontrollable, and so he is blindfolded.

Answer 11

This could also be a partial match to the Psi-power series by Randall Garrett and Laurence Janifer writing under the pseudonym "Mark Phillips".

In this series, an FBI agent Kenneth Malone investigates a series of events that are all related to "psi-powers", including teleportation, pre-cognition, telepathy etc. The series starts in "Brain Twister" with Malone being assigned to investigate a possible telepathic spy getting secrets out of a Nevada research facility to the favourite boogeyman of the USA: the Russians.

At one point in the second book "The Impossibles" a group of teenagers are performing crimes through teleportation into and out of cars and shops, however I don't recall them being reluctant to use the ability.

The series starts off with him being naive and very sceptical of these abilities, then working out that these are a possibility, and finally to him acquiring each of these abilities throughout the series and joining a consortium of other people with these abilities, who are using the powers to collapse the world order so as to prevent World-War III.