[Space] Creating Synthesist characters

[whswhs]

Robert Heinlein had a society run by them in his early novel Beyond This Horizon. A.E. Van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle inserted one into a series of stories that got woven together into a novel, under the label "nexialists." So they go back a ways before Brunner. . . .

Heinlein, at least, gave them all eidetic memory, though he somewhat overestimated the utility of eidetic memory, I think.