Many Years ago, while doing research in Russian History, I happened upon some documents in the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Library that described the existence of a major parapsychology project undertaken in the Soviet Union. I already knew of the work Dr. J.B. Rhine had been doing in parapsychology since the 1930's, but by 1965 he and his wife had moved to Duke University where the intensity of his work increased as UCLA and other entities also became involved.

A cold war rivalry had developed between the Russians and the Americans in most areas of science, so we can be reasonably sure one developed in parapsychology, too. I tucked all this away in my head for many years, until when I retired and could find time and perspective to write about it. It has been percolating for over forty years. A few years ago I began, and this fictional account--The Few Series--is the result. As you probably already know from your own personal mysterious experiences, there's a lot more to this.

The first four books began as one long story and grew too large for publishing in one volume. I rewrote the story into four pieces, hopefully retaining the sense they really are one story.

I see now that even the fine granular detail of the story — the sites, cities, countries, arguments, even the people themselves — are full of symbolism. Auckland, New Zealand, was chosen because Isaac Asimov had chosen Terminus. Southern Virginia was chosen because it is a little backward compared, say, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Palo Alto, California, and there is a reason for this, which I will leave to the commentators to discover. I chose Tobolsk, Siberia, because it is big enough, yet isolated enough. I chose Singapore as a setting because I want to make a point about the kind of civilization that is there. I chose most places because I had been their at least once.

The characters, particularly the protagonists, arrived as my muse revealed herself one day. My muse is usually Clio, so I think the one who actually did most of the work with me was closely related to the muse of history.

Each character is fictional, yet a composite of people I have known or know of. Their surnames are usually from my family tree. Their points of view are not always mine. One character dropped into the story completely unexpectedly ... and gave rise to a theory that pervades the metastory.

I see the first four books of The Few as describing not only the advantages but also the adversity that the emergence of telesentience will bring to people. I try to describe it at several levels, granular to broad blue-sky. Telesentience, we learn, requires a lot of new thinking, and the characters learn this piecemeal, the hard way.

Everyone knows that telepathy and clairvoyance are unlikely to be real, yet everyone with whom I have spoken about it has from personal experience of thoughts, events, and mysterious ideas had to hold open a provisional space in their worldview for an explanation of it. Telesentience means awareness at distance, or in other words, inexplicable distances. The entire series is meant to relieve some of the tension about that provisionality by describing how fictional characters can represent individual, social, and scientific reality!

The sequel Seagull presents the AI situation as an opportunity, if we have the good sense to take it.

The sequel Waterhole presents First Contact context which asks us to reconsider virtually everything we have done since we ambled off the savannahs and occupied the planet.

The Psychecene sequel involves a whole new set of characters to deal with and understand telesentience as a natural progression, evolution, if you will, of our species.

While Founding Mars comes back with the next generation of and some of the characters of the main story to understand how telesentience can be real scientifically and why we need to absorb this into our civilization.

There is more than one meta-theme, of course. The inevitable one is Cooperation, and in this way I hope to supercede anything Ayn Rand wrote about the nature of humanity. The other main theme is that human beings are very complicated and often cannot get out of their own way.

The Few Series is a near-future history entertaining the major themes of human progress within the context of a metaphor. It is only partly science fiction.