review of
Fredric Brown's The Mind Thing
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 23, 2018

There's the recurring problem of trying to review something w/o giving away so much of the story that it ruins it for prospective readers. This is yet-another case of a bk primarily of importance to me for its story rather than, say, its writing style or the way extraneous info of interest is worked into the plot. I found myself completely engrossed in the story & even a bit emotionally involved hoping for a happy ending to an increasingly intensified dilemma.

I was reminded a little of 2 TV shows I watched when I was a kid before I stopped watching TV at age 16: "The Twilight Zone" & "The Outer Limits". I wasn't sure whether either existed in January 1961 when this was published so I checked online: "The Outer Limits" was 1963-1965; "The Twilight Zone" was from Oct 2, 1959, to June 19, 1964. That means that The Mind Thing was published hot-on-the-heels of "The Twilight Zone". Perhaps it was written before "The Twilight Zone" aired but while reading it it was easy to imagine Brown wanting it to be made into a movie or a TV show — & it wd've been a very thrilling one. I'm reminded of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" from 1956. There's a full-page ad for "Stories from the Twilight Zone" at the end of The Mind Thing.

An extraterrestrial comes to Earth. It has substantial powers of perception but no mobility w/o the assistance of others:

"The Mind Thing used his perceptor sense to test this strange and alien environment in which he found himself. He had no organs of vision or hearing, but his perceptor sense was something far better; he could "see" all around himself, very clearly for about twenty yards, tapering to dim vision for another twenty or so, but his seeing was unimpeded by intervening objects. He could see the bark on the far side of a tree as plainly as that on the near side. He could see down into the ground as far and as clearly as in any other direction. His ability to sense vibrations extended even farther and was extremely actute within its range." - p 1

The Mind Thing survives by becoming parasitical on a host. Poor Tommy:

"In this case it took him about a second, average for a moderately intelligent creature. Then he had Tommy Hoffman's mind and, through it, control of Tommy's body. The whatever-you-want-to-call-it that was Tommy Hoffman was still there, but locked up and helpless, unable to use its own body or its own senses. The mind thing had it, and it could obtain release now only through death. Tommy's death, or the mind thing's." - p 8

This is something the reader learns fairly early on wch is why I don't feel like I'm spoiling things by revealing it here. The thrill, for the reader, is knowing these things & being on edge waiting to see how it all plays out. Another thing that becomes obvious to the reader is when the ET makes mistakes:

"Very quietly so as to not awaken the girl (he could have strangled her, of course, but that would be an unnecessary complication; he had no empathy for lesser creatures but neither did he kill wantonly) he got up and started for the path. Since time might be important—someone else might come along that path at any time—he didn't have his host dress. Tommy wore only a pair of blue socks; his other garments—shoes, shorts, trousers, and a shirt—lay in a pile beside where he had been lying." - pp 8-9

"All that was within his grasp if he worked slowly and carefully and made no mistakes. He had made one already, he now realized. He had lessened his present host's value to him by making him act in a manner against human mores, thereby attracting attention to him." - p 19

"He learned above all that he had been careless, and had aroused curiousity by the things he had made his hosts, human or animal, do, especially by the manner in which he had made them kill themselves." - p 63

The ET is a problem child:

"He had not come voluntarily; he had been sent. Not as a scout or as a spearhead of an invasion (although it could turn out that way if he could get back), but as an exile. He was a criminal." - p 18

Perhaps he was sent as a blackhead of an invasion. & I know just the right dermatologist:

"Mr. Staunton was a small wiry man, somewhere in his fifties, with iron gray hair in a short crew cut and with dancing, piercing bright blue eyes.

"His curiosity was almost insatiable. He must have asked at least a hundred questions, and Ella Gross answered all of them. A question about whether anything else unusual had happened brought out the death of the cat and the missing items from the refrigerator. And then he'd asked a lot of questions about each of those matters. He seemed both excited and puzzled." - p 65

Even better, as w/ other Brown bks, there's a reader of science fiction:

""Possession by what, then? I'm a materialist, Miss Talley. I'll admit that the Rhine experiments and some other things have shaken me just a little bit, enough so I don't dogmatically deny the possibility of wild talents like telepathy and telekinesis. And of course hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion are fully accepted scientifically. But not even the wildest enthusiast for parapsychology has suggested that one mind can take over another and control it from inside."

""One human mind," said Miss Talley firmly. "There are billions of planets besides Earth in the universe, and millions of them must be inhabited. How do we know what capabilities and limitations a non-human mind might have? How do we know what an alien, an extra-terrestrial, might be able to do?"" - p 92

Right Arm & Farm Out, Miss Talley. It's summertime. Do you know how hot it is?

"Outside, crickets were chirping, thousands of crickets. Doc's mind wandered and he thought how strange it was that one could tell the temperature, almost exactly, by timing the interval between the chirps of a cricket. A cricket was a thermometer, and probably as accurate as the average household thermometer." - p 109

"Dolbear's law states the relationship between the air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp. It was formulated by Amos Dolbear and published in 1897 in an article called "The Cricket as a Thermometer". Dolbear's observations on the relation between chirp rate and temperature were preceded by an 1881 report by Margarette W. Brooks, although this paper went unnoticed until after Dolbear's publication.

"Dolbear did not specify the species of cricket which he observed, although subsequent researchers assumed it to be the snowy tree cricket, "Oecanthus niveus." However, the snowy tree cricket was misidentified as O. niveus in early reports and the correct scientific name for this species is Oecanthus fultoni.

"The chirping of the more common field crickets is not as reliably correlated to temperature—their chirping rate varies depending on other factors such as age and mating success. In many cases, though, the Dolbear's formula is a close enough approximation for field crickets, too." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear's_law

Might as well get a plug in for Margarette W. Brooks too then but pickins are slim:

"Works
• "Bone fish-hooks", Science (New York), November 16 1883, Vol.2(41), pp.653-4

"Articles in Popular Science Monthly
• “An Experiment in Silk-Culture,” in Popular Science Monthly, 29 (July 1886)
• “Insect Pests of the House,” in Popular Science Monthly, 37 (July 1890)" - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Margarette_Ward_Brooks

& on that note I leave you wondering: did the Mind Thing succeed? Was it detected b/c it took over the mind of a cricket & threw the whole balance of the chirping off? Did the pimple pop? Read the bk. ( )

Fredric Brown was one of the writers from the Golden Age of SF. I have tried a few of his and found this one to be better then most. It's a decent thriller about a clever man/woman team defeating an alien that has stumbled on to Earth. Good enough to finish but not great. ( )

En parasit kommer trådløst hertil i fysisk form og har tilpas mange begrænsninger til at den kloge videnskabsmand måske kan besejre den og vinde det halve kongerige.

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