1951, 7 pages, reading from I Am Legend, the 1995 Richard Matheson anthology

Richard Matheson has become my favorite author in terms of his narrative form and his story telling craft. Postmodern readers might think the idea of ‘Seven pretty little girls sitting in a row,’ and then turning out to be psychic weapons managed by the military to be quaint. Two points beg for any writer of the speculative kind to give this a read.

In Matheson’s hands what is on the face an absurd tale comes to chilling life. His style is insidiously oblique. Even as a bizarre dark fantasy he makes this work, achieving the suspension of disbelief through the use of the novelist’s matter-of-fact craft with an assist from the poet’s lyric form.

Matheson wrote this story in 1951 a decade before the U.S. Military began researching ‘remote viewing’. Back in the 1970s a local Baltimore area woman actually worked on a military base not far from where I write using her ‘psychic powers’ in an attempt to project her astral thoughts around the globe to the Soviet Union in a surveillance role. There was no real hope that such ‘psychic powers’ could ever be weaponized. But when you have fleets of bombers and nuclear submarines, and a Kansas load of ICBM’s all you really need is accurate intelligence.

I am guessing that Matheson somehow got an inkling of what would become the remote viewing program and used it as the basis for his story, as some of his horror seems to have—like much current zombie fiction—a sci-fi premise. On the other hand, maybe that kooky babe was recruited by a crackpot military man, who read this story back when he was a freckle-faced kid in the ROTC?