The cover art for The Brains of Earth depicts the parasites which take over people's brains.
The Brains of Earth (also called Nopalgarth) is a science fiction story by Jack Vance published in 1966. It is about people who have a parasite called a "nopal" living in their brain. The nopals are undetectable to their hosts due to living on an alternate plane of reality. In the story, some people on faraway planets and on Earth have nopals. This is among many Cold War-era stories that used tales of alien takeovers of people's bodies as an allegory for the paranoia about Communist mind control of the West.
Plot
On the distant planet of Ixax, the inhabitants have just finished a destructive civil war. One group of Ixaxians, the Tauptu (who do not have nopals, a type of brain parasite), won the war against the Chitumih (who all have nopals). The Tauptu are pleased that they eradicated nopals on Ixax. Now they wish to eliminate nopals from people on other planets, with Earth's inhabitants being the first target. The challenge with removing nopals is that the host human may die, unless a device called the “denopalizer” is used to dislodge the parasite by inflicting terrible pain on the host.
To accomplish their plan of ridding Earth humans of their nopals, the Tauptu kidnap a scientist from Earth named Paul Burke. The aliens force Burke to create a denopalizer device so that Earth inhabitants can be “treated”. Burke is suspicious of the Tauptuians’ motivations and approach, because they do not seem interested in his ideas for denopalizers that do not involve torture. Burke investigates the nopals, and discovers that another brain parasite, the gher, still exists in the brains of the Tauptuians.
The Tauptu were correct in discovering that nopals exist, but they did not realize that nopals have little harmful impact on the hosts, or that nopals keep the host safe from the malignant coercion of the ghers. Burke invents an anti-gher helmet that incorporates a deceased nopal, which enables him to protect himself from the control of the gher. He then takes command of the Tauptuian spaceship and uses it to travel to gher's homeworld. Once there, he kills the gher.
Known Space is the fictional setting of about a dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories written by Larry Niven. It has also become a shared universe in the spin-off Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all works set in the fictional universe that includes Known Space under the series name Tales of Known Space, which was the title of a 1975 collection of Niven's short stories. The first-published work in the series, which was Niven's first published piece was "The Coldest Place", in the December 1964 issue of If magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. This was the first-published work in the 1975 collection.
A positronic brain is a fictional technological device, originally conceived by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It functions as a central processing unit (CPU) for robots, and, in some unspecified way, provides them with a form of consciousness recognizable to humans. When Asimov wrote his first robot stories in 1939 and 1940, the positron was a newly discovered particle, and so the buzz word "positronic" added a scientific connotation to the concept. Asimov's 1942 short story "Runaround" elaborates his fictional Three Laws of Robotics, which are ingrained in the positronic brains of nearly all of his robots.
A universal translator is a device common to many science fiction works, especially on television. First described in Murray Leinster's 1945 novella "First Contact", the translator's purpose is to offer an instant translation of any language.
The Brood are a fictional race of insectoid, parasitic, extraterrestrial beings appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, especially Uncanny X-Men. Created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum, they first appeared in The Uncanny X-Men #155.
My Teacher Is an Alien is a four-book science fiction children's book series authored by Bruce Coville. The titles include:
Starro is a supervillain appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character first appeared in The Brave and the Bold #28. It was created by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky.
Mind uploading, whole brain emulation, or substrate-independent minds, is a use of a computer or another substrate as an emulated human brain. The term "mind transfer" also refers to a hypothetical transfer of a mind from one biological brain to another. Uploaded minds and societies of minds, often in simulated realities, are recurring themes in science-fiction novels and films since the 1950s.
Old Man's War is a military science fiction novel by American writer John Scalzi, published in 2005. His debut novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006.
The fictional portrayal of the Solar System has often included planets, moons, and other celestial objects which do not actually exist in reality. Some of these objects were, at one time, seriously considered as hypothetical planets which were either thought to have been observed, or were hypothesized to be orbiting the Sun in order to explain certain celestial phenomena. Often such objects continued to be used in literature long after the hypotheses upon which they were based had been abandoned.
Radiant is a science fiction novel by the Canadian author James Alan Gardner. It was published in 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers under their Eos Books imprint. It is the seventh novel in Gardner's "League of Peoples" series. Like the six preceding novels, Radiant is set in the middle of the 25th century; like most of them, it takes place in outer space and on alien planets, and features the continuing character Festina Ramos.
Mind control has proven a popular subject in fiction, featuring in books and films such as The Manchurian Candidate and The IPCRESS File, both stories advancing the premise that controllers could hypnotize a person into murdering on command while retaining no memory of the killing. As a narrative device, mind control serves as a convenient means of introducing changes in the behavior of characters, and is used as a device for raising tension and audience uncertainty in the contexts of the Cold War and terrorism. Mind control has often been an important theme in science fiction and fantasy stories. Terry O'Brien comments: "Mind control is such a powerful image that if hypnotism did not exist, then something similar would have to have been invented: the plot device is too useful for any writer to ignore. The fear of mind control is equally as powerful an image."
The Sky People is an alternate history science fiction novel by American writer S. M. Stirling. It was first published by Tor Books in hardcover in November 2006, with a book club edition co-published with the Science Fiction Book Club following in December of the same year. Tor issued paperback, ebook, and trade paperback editions in October 2007, April 2010, and May 2010 respectively. Audiobook editions were published by Tantor Media in January 2007.
An isolated brain is a brain kept alive in vitro, either by perfusion or by a blood substitute, often an oxygenated solution of various salts, or by submerging the brain in oxygenated artificial cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). It is the biological counterpart of brain in a vat. A related concept, attaching the brain or head to the circulatory system of another organism, is called a head transplant. An isolated brain, however, is more typically attached to an artificial perfusion device rather than a biological body.
Ancient astronauts have been addressed frequently in science fiction and horror fiction. Occurrences in the genres include:
Beyond the Veil of Stars is a science-fiction novel by Robert Reed, first published in 1994. It describes a world in which the sky undergoes a transformation that prevents people from seeing the stars, giving them instead a view of the other side of the world, as if the Earth had been turned inside out. Accompanying this transformation are increased reports of UFO activity and the appearance of large circles of black glass at thousands of locations across the planet. Once the panic dies down, people resume their normal lives. Meanwhile, a shadowy government agency begins experiments using "quantum intrusions" to travel to other worlds.
Parasites appear frequently in biology-inspired fiction from ancient times onwards, with a flowering in the nineteenth century. These include intentionally disgusting alien monsters in science fiction films, often with analogues in nature. Authors and scriptwriters have to some extent exploited parasite biology: lifestyles including parasitoid, behaviour-altering parasite, brood parasite, parasitic castrator, and many forms of vampire are found in books and films. Some fictional parasites, like Count Dracula and Alien's Xenomorphs, have become well known in their own right.
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