A Question for Readers/Writers

[scififanatic]

Okay, so I'm trying to figure out how many "body snatcher" type of stories have been done in science fiction. I know of some stories but I'm hoping people on my friends list can point out some recent short stories or novels I've missed:

The Puppet Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein
It Came From Outer Space, by Ray Bradbury
The Body Snatchers, by Jack Finney
The Host, (forthcoming) by Stephenie Meyer

What have I missed? Also, what do you like or dislike about the body snatcher concept?

Your comments are very much appreciated and helpful to me right now!

Steph

Comments

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Depending on how you define/categorize body snatching stories, you've missed "Who Goes There" by John Campbell and "The Father Thing" by Philip K Dick. Probably others.

I tend to locate the whole body snatcher thing in a particular historical period--the whole "Your neighbor could be a commie and you don't even know it!" thing. I don't have any particular like or dislike for it, it's just that nearly all incarnations I've read of it have a good strong whiff of cold war paranoia to them.

[scififanatic.livejournal.com]

Thank you for those two references! I'm making a list so I can read and see how each is done differently. It's helpful to know that you've observed a majority of the stories come out of cold war paranoia.

[ktsparrow.livejournal.com]

My favorite is Wild Seed, by Octavia Butler.

[scififanatic.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[eclexys.livejournal.com]

You're not counting films, huh? Just literary instantiations?

'Cuz there's all those films, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The Stepford Wives and the more recent (and so-so) remake The Invasion. And there's some level on which zombie movies also come into play, since the dynamic in many is similar.

For my money, Ann's right about it as coming from cold war paranoia, though I think the literary roots might go deeper. No precedent comes to mind, but I'd be searching Poe and Lovecraft if I were after one. Or, of course, the whole Opium Eater deal in De Quincey. Anyway, Tom Disch, in his history of SF, explicitly links the mental state of the snatched in The Puppet Masters with the mental state of Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eight-Four. Hell, if you interpret "body-snatcher" in a fluid way, I'd say you could consider Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" a precedent of sorts. And as a more techno-horror form, there's the looming threat of YGBM technology in the background of Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. If I recall correctly, there's a similar thread of symbiotic nano-fungal gear in Rudy Rucker's Ware series.

Oh, and the coolest non-fiction book I can mention here is Blackmore's The Meme Machine where a scientist posits that maybe everything mental, right down to our perception of our own identity, is just memetic turtles all the way down: in other words, that we've all been essentially bodysnatched into consciousness by evolution and the effect on it of the aeons-long development of human culture. She actually posits that the executive self is illusory and that there's nothing but memes interacting... and that this is, in the end, okay, because it's the way things are. I don't know what I think of that theory, but the book is a hell of a mad trip to read through to the end.

[eclexys.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. What I don't like is the ease with which whatever it is actually manages to do the snatch. I mean, symbiosis is hard to cook up in a short span of time. The stuff needs to be real smart to pull it off. Yes somehow the bosdy-snatching aliens can interface perfectly with our brains soon after apparent first contact.

Reminds me, Greg Egan's Teranesia is a kind of hard-SF body/genome-snatcher involving, well, nothing from space.