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.
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'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.