In 1947, Murray Leinster put on his thinking cap: BrainFi Gets in Your Head

BrainFi Gets in Your Head

The Brain Stealers is a good early example of speculation about thoughts as a potential mechanism for communication. Is there a chance that brains could be networked? Murray Leinster's answer: Yes. 

Murray Leinster was a machine. The man wrote 56 novels and more short stories than I even want to think about. He was one of those writers who just worked. He banged it out. He thought about making books people would want to buy, at lengths they would want to read. 

He was a one-man factory of fiction.

In 1954, he published The Brain Stealers, a novelization of a short story he's published in 1947 called "The Man In the Iron Cap." 

The book really takes on two topics: first contact and the police state. 

Jim Hunt is a scientist who has been experimenting with transmitting thought. This gets him in trouble with the Security Police, who basically rule the world. They keep everything safe. 

Just as Hunt escapes, a spaceship lands just where he happened to get away from the Security Police. It lands unobserved. 

Soon Hunt notices that people are acting very strangely. They all seem strangely run down too. It turns out that they have all joined a hivemind created by alien invaders. 

I've never encountered aliens quite like these in other fiction. Without giving too much away, they are fat and lazy aliens. They turn humans into slaves, but they only do it because they need agents to keep themselves comfortable, fat, warm and happy. 

In the end, it turns out that Hunt's research proves to be just what's needed to crack humans free from the brain stealers. Take that Security Police.

If you're hoping for a book that offers something intriguing or legible about how science might be used to crack non-invasive brain communication, you'll be disappointed. This is not that kind of sci-fi. In fact, it's very clear that Leinster was writing to a specific length, and any number of times he gets a little hand-wavey to move to the next piece of the plot.

There's something refreshing about that. He wasn't crafting a masterpiece. He was doing a piece of work, because people wanted it. And they would pay for it. 

—Brady Dale
October 14, 2026

Next BrainFi: Has humanity always been destined to join the Borg?: BrainFi Gets in Your Head