Yet Another "Name That SciFi" question

March 1, 2006 10:14 AM

Help me identify other books or stories that include a theme present in Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites.

In that book, a group of people are the first to travel far enough from the Earth to get out of range of an Evil Psychic Influence On The Moon; great power (and great responsibility) ensue. (It's a much better book than this capsule description is making it out to be, honest.)

I'm certain there are other stories which involve one or more people [traveling outside of / building a shield against] [the earth's gravitational well / magnetic field / crowds of people / whatever] and being fundamentally changed as a result, learning that all this time we've been under the influence of some debilitating force so constant that we didn't know it existed -- like fish discovering the existence of water. But I can't think of any other than that one. Any ideas?

posted by ook to Media & Arts (14 answers total)

Walter Jon Williams has written the first two books of trilogy: "Metropolitan" and "City on Fire." They are sort of the reverse of what you're talking about. In his books, there's a mysterious "shield" around the Earth, making it impossible for anyone to leave.

"Logan's Run" and "This Perfect Day" are both about people escaping dystopias. ("traveling outside of" ... "crowds of people").
posted by grumblebee at 10:24 AM on March 1, 2006

Best answer: If "group of people" can include everyone, then Poul Anderson's
Brainwave counts. The plot involves the entire Earth moving out of a region of space that had been suppressing our intelligence.
posted by notbuddha at 10:26 AM on March 1, 2006

notbuddha, I was think of that exact book, but didn't remember the title! I believe the issue was that the Earth moved into a region where the speed of light was faster. Entering it was what wiped out the dinosaurs. Everyone gets smarter as chemical reactions speed up.
posted by GuyZero at 10:31 AM on March 1, 2006

Best answer: Also, Vernor Vinge's novels A fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky as well as his novella The Blabber revolve around the galaxy being separated into concentric "Zones of Thought."

The Slow Zone is the region which contains the Earth. Things work there pretty much as we expect, except that computers much beyond the complexity we currently have are impossible.

As you get further from the galactic core, in the Beyond, higher computational abilities become available.

Inward lie the Unthinking Depths, where sentient thought become impossible.
posted by notbuddha at 10:32 AM on March 1, 2006

For some reason, I'm reminded of Spider Robinson's Telempath, in which civilization is abandoned after everyone's sense of smell is accidentally increased a thousand-fold, and the survivors can even smell "ghosts." Good book.
posted by steef at 10:37 AM on March 1, 2006

In Orson Scott's Card first books of his series Homecoming (5 volumes), the Oversoul, an artificial intelligence orbiting a planet called Harmony, manages the whole planet by intervening directly in the mind of its inhabitants. But the Oversoul is crumbling and we follow several characters as they discover words and concepts formerly inaccessible or suppressed.
posted by bru at 10:48 AM on March 1, 2006

Best answer: You should look at the story "Unwelcome Tenant," by Roger Dee, available in this anthology. The story follows the first astronaut to leave earth orbit, and thus the Evil Psychic Influence that accompanies all earth-bound intelligences. (According to this website, Wilson acknowledges it as the the inspiration for his book).
posted by googly at 11:10 AM on March 1, 2006

There's a story called "The Crystal Spheres" by David Brin, wherein humanity discovers that the Solar System is completely enclosed in a kind of transparent shield. The shield is broken the first time a spaceship encounters it.

Travelling outside the shield doesn't fundamentally change the people who do it (except for the first ship that hit and broke the shield, which was destroyed by the impact.) However, subsequent exploration proves that all other systems with habitable planets have these shields, and they can't be broken from the outside. IIRC, this causes all of humanity to become very depressed, because they can't colonize the habitable planets nor communicate with any intelligent species that might be inside the spheres.

There's also a recent shield-around-the-earth book called Spin, of which I've heard favorable reviews, but I haven't yet read it.
posted by fermion at 11:13 AM on March 1, 2006

Flatland?
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 11:21 AM on March 1, 2006

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is an excellent read, but doesn't really fall into the "fish discovering water" category. Rather than discovering that the Earth has been enclosed in some barrier/force/etc. all along, the shield appears quite suddenly at the beginning of the book, and things progress from there.
posted by Janta at 11:59 AM on March 1, 2006

There's also Quarantine, by Greg Egan, about an impenetrable shield suddenly appearing around and isolating the earth and its immediate environment from the rest of the galaxy. I recall that the description of the relativistic perception of the instantaneous manifestion of an enormous spherical shell from a position within the shell is quite impressive.
posted by meehawl at 12:27 PM on March 1, 2006

Also, don't forget Asimov's Nightfall.
posted by vacapinta at 1:12 PM on March 1, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks, one and all! (The ones I marked as best answer come closest to what I had in mind -- which was more about the fish-discovering-water thing than the literal barrier or travel leading up to the discovery -- but many of the others look good too. (Nightfall and Flatland in particular both put interesting twists on the idea, in different directions...)

Can I just take a moment to say how cool it is to have the equivalent of an army of research librarians at my disposal, in return for nothing more than acting as one of those librarians from time to time? This is a real "I'm living in the future now" kind of thing.
posted by ook at 1:31 PM on March 1, 2006

I remember how much I liked reading Mind Parasites years ago, and also how much I enjoyed some of Colin Wilson's other novels, including The Philosopher's Stone and The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme.
posted by madstop1 at 5:41 PM on March 1, 2006