The Body Snatchers

The Body Snatchers is a 1955 science fiction novel by Jack Finney, originally serialized in Colliers Magazine in 1954, which describes a town in Marin County, California, being invaded by seeds that have drifted to Earth from space. The seeds replace sleeping people with perfect physical duplicates grown from plantlike pods, while their human victims turn to dust.

The duplicates live only five years, and they cannot sexually reproduce; consequently, if unstopped, they will quickly turn Earth into a dead planet and move on to the next world.

The novel has been adapted for the screen four times; the first film in 1956, the second in 1978, the third in 1993, and the most recent in 2007. Unlike the first three film adaptations, the novel contains an optimistic ending, with the aliens voluntarily vacating after deciding that they cannot tolerate the type of resistance they see in the main characters.

A short story by Philip K. Dick, "The Father-Thing," which appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1954, also used the idea of pods duplicating humans, and fire being the means of destroying the pods.

First edition

• Finney, Jack. The Body Snatchers. New York : Dell, c1955

See also

• Pod People
• The Puppet Masters (1951), a novel by Robert A. Heinlein with a very similar concept.
• It Came From Outer Space (1953), based on a Ray Bradbury story, which had an alien invasion where humans are duplicated by the aliens.
• The Faculty (1998), a film that mentions the connection between The Body Snatchers and The Puppet Masters.
• The Host (2008), a novel by Stephanie Meyer, depicts a world where the human population has already been taken over by parasitic aliens.

Adaptations

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• Body Snatchers (1993)
• The Invasion (2007)

External links

• Cinrfantastique book review
• Critique of book to filmed versions