Fictions about races with telepathic or psionic powers frequently portray them as threats to the human race, or to civilization. John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) is an especially scary example; the total annihilation of the beautiful but ruthlessly destructive "children" who can communicate directly with each other's minds across great distances and read the minds of their human hosts with ease, is justified in the name of protecting humanity from domination by a race with such unfair advantages. Other writers, notably Ursula Le Guin in The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and Russ in And Chaos Died, portray such powers as an evolutionary advance or as a parallel evolutionary development that would lead to a more peaceable and creative civilization. In Le Guin's story, the "natives" are as much in tune with their environment as they are with each other; the earthmen's intended despoliation of the...