author
Neil J. Kenney
A little-known mid-century science fiction writer, Neil J. Kenney is remembered for a single published story that imagines telepathic outsiders struggling against fear and conformity. That rarity gives the work an intriguing, almost lost-pulp quality.
1 Audiobook
They Were Different
by Neil J. Kenney
About the author
Very little biographical information about Neil J. Kenney appears to be publicly documented. The main reliably confirmed detail is that he wrote They Were Different, a science fiction story published in the 1950s and now preserved by Project Gutenberg.
Because so little is known about the author, the story itself does most of the talking. It centers on telepathic people whose unusual abilities set them apart from society, giving the work a classic science fiction interest in difference, prejudice, and the pressure to fit in.
That scarcity of background can make Kenney especially interesting to modern listeners. He feels like one of the many nearly forgotten voices of magazine-era science fiction whose surviving work still offers a vivid glimpse of the genre's ideas and anxieties.