BrainFi

I read Murray Leinster's The Brain Stealers recently. It's about a bunch of fat, lazy aliens who use telepathy to take control of humans. All it wants is for humans to keep them in a warm soft place and bring them blood every day.

Meanwhile, I had been working on some sci-fi stories about consciousness, and then I read this book. And then I stumbled on a book by Spider Robinson called Mindkiller in the books for sale at my local library. I snagged it.

There is a lot of sci-fi out there about psychics, mind control, wireheading and etc. Sci-fi about brains and consciousness. So I am declaring that a new sub-genre, BrainFi.

Fiction that grapples with consciousness, intelligence and the limits of identity has become especially salient now in our new age of commodified intelligence.

So I've been talking about this with AI a lot. And I've been going to used bookstores and looking for books that seem to count, discussing them with ChatGPT, and pushing forward. 

Here's the list I've come up with. I have only read a few of these, but I own several more. Eventually I plan to write more about this, but here's a preview of the canon of BrainFi that I've come up with so far.

I've read some of these. I own a bunch more. One of these days I will write about this category on my Substack. This is a fun category. 

Any other suggestions?

• Update 10/15/2026: It occurred to me that there's probably a bunch of horror that fits the category as well, so I asked ChatGPT (I'm no horror aficionado) and it confirmed it. So I have added a bunch of horror books in here now from its updated list. 

(All the text below is by ChatGPT)

Anderson, Poul

• Brain Wave (1954) — Earth escapes a field that has suppressed neural function, abruptly making humans and animals several times more intelligent. Google Books

Bester, Alfred

• The Demolished Man (1953) — A murderer tries to get away with his crime in a society where telepaths can read thoughts. Wikipedia
• The Stars My Destination (1956) — Humanity develops psychic teleportation, and the novel eventually pushes into radically expanded perception and mental capacities. Wikipedia

Brown, Fredric

• The Mind Thing (1961) — An alien consciousness survives by entering, controlling, and abandoning the bodies of Earth creatures. Wikiquote

Brunner, John

• The Atlantic Abomination (1960) — An ancient alien intelligence uses telepathic domination to enslave human minds.
• The Whole Man (1964) — An extraordinarily powerful telepath becomes a psychiatric healer who enters damaged minds; also published as Telepathist. Wikipedia
• The Stone That Never Came Down (1973) — A biological agent radically changes human cognition and behavior, potentially curing violence, prejudice, and irrationality. Open Library

Butler, Octavia E.

• Patternmaster (1976) — Humanity includes a ruling caste of telepaths linked through a psychic network, with power struggles fought partly through direct mental domination. Absolutely brain-fi.
• Wild Seed (1980) — Immortal/shape-shifting humans and a centuries-long program of breeding people for psychic abilities, so it's brain-fi adjacent but less purely so than Patternmaster.
• Mind of My Mind (1977) — Telepaths are bred into a networked psychic community that begins functioning as a collective mind; probably the most directly brain-fi of the series.

Cadigan, Pat

• Mindplayers (1987) — Psychotechnicians alter, enter, repair, and manipulate other people's minds as if consciousness itself were workable material. WorldCat
• Synners (1991) — Brain implants and direct neural interfaces blur the boundaries between minds, bodies, machines, and networked consciousness. Google Books

Clarke, Arthur C.

• Childhood's End (1953) — Human children begin developing psychic powers and ultimately merge into a higher collective consciousness. Wikipedia
• The City and the Stars (1956) — Human personalities and memories are stored, reconstructed, and reborn by a vast computer in a civilization obsessed with psychological stability.

Dick, Philip K.

• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) — Drugs create shared subjective worlds whose users may be trapped inside another consciousness rather than merely hallucinating. Wikipedia
• Ubik (1969) — Telepaths, anti-telepaths, half-dead consciousness, psychic warfare, and collapsing subjective reality all occupy the same magnificent mess. Philip K. Dick
• A Scanner Darkly (1977) — Drugs and surveillance fracture one man's cognition until his two identities cease recognizing that they belong to the same brain. Philip K. Dick

Disch, Thomas M.

• Camp Concentration (1968) — Prisoners are deliberately infected with a fatal disease because it produces extraordinary increases in intelligence. Wikipedia

Egan, Greg

• Quarantine (1992) — Neural modifications, altered consciousness, and a human mind with bizarre quantum effects turn cognition itself into hard-SF machinery. Greg Egan
• Permutation City (1994) — Human minds are scanned into software, copied, modified, restarted, and forced to confront whether a digital consciousness is actually the same person. WorldCat
• Diaspora (1997) — Much of humanity consists of fully digital minds whose identities, bodies, memories, and subjective environments are computational. Wikipedia

Ellison, Harlan

• A Boy and His Dog (1969) — a post-apocalyptic boy survives with a genetically enhanced telepathic dog, so mind-to-mind communication is central rather than decorative. Wikipedia
• The Executioner of the Malformed Children (1978) — centers on a telepath who is cast out, making psychic ability itself the core abnormality. ndhfilms.com
• The Region Between (1970) — a human soul/consciousness is harvested, transferred between bodies, and rebels against being treated as a commodity. Very strong consciousness-transfer brain-fi. harlanellison.com
• Demon with a Glass Hand (1964) — amnesia, hidden identity, partial machine cognition, and a protagonist whose own mental status is the mystery; technically a teleplay rather than prose fiction.

Farris, John

• The Fury (1976) — Teenagers with powerful psychic abilities are exploited by a secret government program; telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, psychic violence.
  
• The Fury and the Terror (2001) — Continues the psychic-horror premise on a larger scale.
  

Harper, Tara K.

• Lightwing (1992) — A powerful telepath with unusual mind-over-matter abilities works on an FTL research project in a society where psychic talents are recognized and professionally useful. Google Books
• Cat Scratch Fever (1994) — People can deliberately create biological "gates" linking their minds telepathically to other lifeforms; the heroine develops a forbidden psychic bond with cats. Google Books
• Cataract (1995) — The same heroine can enter feline minds through her engineered telepathic link and risks losing that ability if society discovers she has violated its rules.

Heinlein, Robert A.

• The Puppet Masters (1951) — Alien parasites attach themselves to human bodies and seize direct control of their hosts' nervous systems and behavior.

Herbert, Frank

• Destination: Void (1966) — Scientists attempt to manufacture genuine artificial consciousness rather than merely build a computer that behaves intelligently. Wikipedia
• The Santaroga Barrier (1968) — A psychoactive substance gives an isolated community a strange collective awareness that erodes ordinary individual consciousness. WorldCat

Keyes, Daniel

• Flowers for Algernon (1966) — Experimental surgery transforms a man's intelligence and forces him to experience cognition, personality, and selfhood changing in real time. Wikipedia

Koontz, Dean

• The Door to December (1985) — Psychic experimentation on a child produces telekinetic phenomena and psychological horror.
  
• Strangers (1986) — Suppressed memory, altered consciousness, collective experience, and people discovering that their minds have been manipulated.
  

Le Guin, Ursula K.

• The Lathe of Heaven (1971) — One man's dreams unconsciously rewrite objective reality, prompting a psychiatrist to try to harness his mind as a world-changing instrument. Wikipedia

Lee, Tanith

• Biting the Sun (1979) — In a post-scarcity society where people routinely change bodies, sex, appearance, and even die and return in new forms, the central problem becomes what remains of the self when physical identity is almost completely disposable.
• Electric Forest (1979) — A woman's consciousness is transferred into an artificial body, making identity, embodiment, and continuity of self the central speculative problem.

Leinster, Murray

• The Brain-Stealers (1954) — Alien parasites mentally enslave humans, while resistance depends on recognizing and blocking their psychic control. Steven H Silver

Lem, Stanisław

• Solaris (1961) — Human researchers confront an alien intelligence so radically unlike the human mind that they cannot determine whether meaningful communication with it is even possible.

Lichtenberg, Jacqueline

• House of Zeor (1974) — Humanity has split into biologically interdependent groups linked by a quasi-psychic life energy, making bodily sensation, emotional control, and mental rapport central to society.
• Unto Zeor, Forever (1978) — The Sime–Gen relationship becomes an elaborate physiological and psychological system of energy transfer, control, dependency, and intimate mental connection. Kirkus Reviews

Matheson, Richard

• Hell House (1971) — Psychic investigators enter an extremely hostile haunted house; telepathy, mediumship, psychokinesis, and competing theories of consciousness.
  
• A Stir of Echoes (1958) — Hypnosis accidentally opens a man to telepathy and paranormal perception.
  

Niven, Larry

• "Death by Ecstasy" (1969) — Direct electrical stimulation of the brain's pleasure center creates the lethally addictive "wirehead" phenomenon.
• The Ringworld Engineers (1980) — A major character struggles with wirehead addiction, while the remotely acting tasp demonstrates how directly stimulating pleasure can become a mechanism of control.

Robinson, Spider

• Mindkiller (1982) — Direct electrical stimulation of the brain's pleasure center becomes devastatingly addictive, alongside memory manipulation and behavioral control. Wikipedia

Saul, John

• The God Project (1982) — Secret experimentation on children, altered behavior, latent psychic abilities, and institutional manipulation.

Silverberg, Robert

• To Live Again (1969) — Recorded personalities of the dead can be implanted into living brains, producing minds occupied by multiple selves. Wikipedia
• The Man in the Maze (1969) — Alien contact leaves a man involuntarily broadcasting a psychic field that makes other humans recoil from him. Wikipedia
• Dying Inside (1972) — A lifelong telepath experiences his mind-reading ability gradually disappearing in middle age. WorldCat
• The Second Trip (1972) — Society erases criminals' personalities and installs manufactured identities, until one supposedly destroyed personality begins returning. Wikipedia
• The Stochastic Man (1975) — A political forecaster encounters genuine precognition and begins learning how a human mind might perceive the future. Open Library
• Tom O'Bedlam (1985) — A seemingly mad man's visions of alien worlds begin spreading to other people, suggesting psychic transmission and a transformation of consciousness.

Simmons, Dan

• Carrion Comfort (1989) — Telepathic predators who can seize control of other human beings and use them like puppets.

Sturgeon, Theodore

• More Than Human (1953) — People with telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and extraordinary cognition combine into a single higher-order human organism. Google Books
• The Cosmic Rape (1958) — An extraterrestrial hive mind attempts to assimilate humanity into a vast collective consciousness. Wikipedia

Tiptree, James Jr.

• Up the Walls of the World (1978) — Telepathic alien minds, human psychics, disembodied consciousness, and radically different forms of sentience collide. Wikipedia

van Vogt, A. E.

• Slan (1940) — Telepathic mutant humans with enhanced intelligence are hunted by ordinary humanity while searching for others of their kind.

Watson, Ian

• The Embedding (1973) — Experimental linguistics tests whether radically different language structures can reshape human thought and consciousness. WorldCat

Wagner, Karl Edward

• The Killer (1985, with David Drake) — psychic/alien mental intrusion and violent possession; pulpier, but on-theme.
  

Watts, Peter

• Blindsight (2006) — First contact becomes an investigation into whether intelligence actually requires consciousness at all, sharply separating cognition from subjective awareness.

Wilson, Colin

• The Mind Parasites (1967) — Invisible entities feed on human mental energy, and fighting them leads people to discover latent psychic and cognitive powers.

Wyndham, John

• The Chrysalids (1955) — Telepathic children secretly form a shared mental community in a society that persecutes biological difference.
• The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) — A generation of eerily intelligent children functions through telepathy and a collective group mind.

Zelazny, Roger

• The Dream Master (1966) — A psychotherapist enters patients' dreams through neural technology and manipulates their subjective worlds from inside their minds.

—Brady Dale
October 12, 2026