The Brain-Stealers by Murray Leinster

He had the spiral big enough.  Fifteen--twenty yards of wire were coiled into an untidy disk some twelves inches across.  Then came a soundless thought in his mind.

"Not nice....Not nice to hate the Little Fellas...Little Fellas are nice....It is not nice to judge them....It is wrong to think of hating them without seeing one to know what he is like...."

A week or so ago I drove to Gaithersburg, MD to buy bruschetta and chocolate cereal at Trader Joe's, and stopped in at the Wonder Books there and picked up four paperbacks.  Among them was Murray Leinster's The Brain-Stealers, an edition put out in the late 1970s as part of Ace's Science Fiction from the Great Years series; it has a great Stephen Hickman cover with a symmetrical composition and three exciting nudes that seem to be celebrating the ability of the human race to transcend all obstacles and boundaries.  The Brain-Stealers was first published in book form in 1954 as part of an Ace Double, and is an expansion of a story of Leinster's that debuted in a 1947 issue of Startling, "The Man in the Iron Cap." 

The Brain-Stealers has a lot in common with many other Golden Age and pre-Golden Age SF stories.  The hero is a scientist who resolves the plot through his wits, ultimately by building a machine.  The story glorifies the search for knowledge and the development of new technology and denounces those who would stifle Man's scientific and technological progress.  Our hero must defeat a tyrannical government and an alien invasion.  His efforts are rewarded with a paradigm shift and a sense-of-wonder ending; we readers are invited to marvel at the limitless opportunities for learning and adventure offered by the universe beyond the Earth's orbit, and reminded that the human race has the capacity to overcome all obstacles and seize those opportunities and make the most of them. 

It is the future, the 1970s!  A few decades ago, fear of nuclear war lead to the creation of a world government run by a bunch of scientists who forbid all research into and development of nuclear power and had at their bidding an air fleet of zeppelins and helicopters to enforce their prohibitions.  Once firmly in power, these scientists expanded their remit to cover all sorts of scientific research--perceiving that some level of risk is inherent in all scientific experiments and all new technological developments, they eventually severely curtailed most scientific work and closely monitored the rest.  With scientific progress almost halted, society fell into stagnation.

James Hunt was one scientist who bucked the system, a man committed to pursuing research into thought, in particular how thoughts might be transmitted and received by other brains.  (There's a fair portion of technical talk and jargon in The Brain-Stealers that I really didn't understand and has no effect on the plot, talk about fields and waves and all that.)  Hunt was forbidden to conduct such experiments, but continued to do so in secret, anyway.  He was surprised when he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison; how had the government detected his work?  The world government's agents claimed they could detect his continued experiments, which Hunt found unlikely, due to all the precautions he had taken.

As the story begins, Hunt escapes from the dirigible carrying him to his place of custody, parachuting down into a mountainous rural district.  In this out of the way region he senses thought transmissions!  It must have been these transmissions the world government detected and attributed to Hunt and his supposed confederates!  But Hunt worked alone, and these transmissions are from an inhuman source, tiny vampiric space aliens!

These aliens are less than a foot long, small and weak, but they can put thoughts into your head that you think are your own and thus make you their slave!  These rapacious extraterrestrials have taken over the isolated farms in this area, sucking the blood of their slaves and expanding their hold into nearby towns.  You see, when one of these disgusting little alien bastards (Hunt calls them "Things," but they self-identify as "Little Fellas") has drunk enough blood, it reproduces by a mitosis-like process of splitting in half, producing an exact clone of itself, complete with the original's memories.  Each individual little monster thus has memories that stretch back to the beginning of their race.  When a new Little Fella splits off from its parent, it is carried by a slave to a new human family which it swiftly enslaves.  Unambitious and simple-minded, the aliens care only for the comforts of a warm nest and plenty of blood to drink, and those here on Earth spend all their time lazing in a box full of straw or some similar nest, set cozily next to a warm chimney in an attic or down in the basement next to the boiler, controlling their slaves via thought, when hungry calling somebody over to suck his or her blood.  The aliens are gluttonous and poor stewards of their slaves, and most of the people Hunt sees look anemic and stagger around weakly. 

(This group of Little Fellas got to Earth on a spaceship crewed by slaves who are now dead, members of a spacefaring race who had the misfortune to land on a planet already controlled by the Little Fellas.)

These vampiric aliens are a sort of parallel or mirror image of the world government.  They themselves have no ambition, and by introducing thoughts of contentment into the heads of their slaves turn them docile and cause their civilizations to stagnate.      

Hunt, the world expert on thought transmission, recognizes that these new thoughts in his head are from an external source before they can lull him into servitude.  He quickly makes a cap out of iron wire that will protect him from the alien thought transmissions, and sets about foiling the invasion.  Most of the novel follows him as he moves about the countryside and then into a town, running for his life, putting on disguises, learning about the Little Fellas, trying to alert those human authorities still beyond control of the Things of the alien danger, then finally building a machine capable of jamming the transmissions.  He runs into a man resistant to the alien transmissions because he has a metal plate in his head, and this guy, a prominent businessman, helps out our hero.  After various twists and turns and no small measure of good luck, the device is finished and the aliens are defeated.  The world government sees the error of its ways, ceases to stifle scientific research and puts Hunt in charge of exploiting the spaceship--with this new alien technology mankind will explore the universe and lead a crusade against the Little Fellas, liberating and befriending those civilizations which the diabolical Little Fellas have held in slavery.

I like Leinster's theme that it is not only decadent parasitic murderers who can rob you of your freedom and make your society stagnate, but sophisticated people who, for your own good, of course!, seek to limit your risk in the name of safety and stability.  And Leinster's plot is not bad.  But Leinster's writing style is kind of weak; he tries to convey emotion, expending quite a bit of ink describing Hunt's anger and fear and so forth, but it doesn't quite work.  Leinster's writing also seems a little repetitive, with some passages feeling redundant, going over material we've already heard.  There are also some issues with my copy that I think have to be blamed on the publisher, typos and things--also, the title, while cool, doesn't suit the story all that well; "The Man in the Iron Cap" is a much more appropriate title.

So we'll say The Brain Stealers is OK.