Mind uploading in fiction

Mind uploading in fiction
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Mind uploading, mind transfer or whole brain emulation is the theoretically possible use of the brain as a computer and of thoughts as software. It is a common theme in science fiction.

Contents

Early and particularly important examples

One of the earliest examples can be found in Frederik Pohl's story "The Tunnel Under the World" from 1955. In this story, the protagonist Guy Burckhardt continually wakes up on the same date from a dream of dying in an explosion. Burckhardt is already familiar with the idea of putting human minds in robotic bodies, since this is what is done with the robot workers at the nearby Contro Chemical factory. As someone has once explained it to him, "each machine was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being ... It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells." Later in the story, Pohl gives some additional description of the procedure: "Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all." After some investigation, Burckhardt learns that his entire town had been killed in a chemical explosion, and the brains of the dead townspeople had been scanned and placed into miniature robotic bodies in a miniature replica of the town (as a character explains to him, 'It's as easy to transfer a pattern from a dead brain as a living one'), so that a businessman named Mr. Dorchin could charge companies to use the townspeople as test subjects for new products and advertisements.

Something close to the notion of mind uploading is very briefly mentioned in Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question: "One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain." A more detailed exploration of the idea (and one in which individual identity is preserved, unlike in Asimov's story) can be found in Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars, also from 1956 (this novel was a revised and expanded version of Clarke's earlier story Against the Fall of Night, but the earlier version did not contain the elements relating to mind uploading). The story is set in a city named Diaspar one billion years in the future, where the minds of inhabitants are stored as patterns of information in the city's Central Computer in between a series of 1000-year lives in cloned bodies. Various commentators identify this story as one of the first (if not the first) to deal with mind uploading, human-machine synthesis, and computerized immortality.[1][2][3][4]

Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mårtensson, a novel in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction.

In Robert Silverberg's To Live Again (1969), an entire worldwide economy is built up around the buying and selling of "souls" (personas that have been tape-recorded at six month intervals), allowing well-heeled consumers the opportunity to spend tens of millions of dollars on a medical treatment that uploads the most recent recordings of archived personalities into the minds of the buyers. Federal law prevents people from buying a "personality recording" unless the possessor first had died; similarly, two or more buyers were not allowed to own a "share" of the persona. In this novel, the personality recording always went to the highest bidder. However, when one attempted to buy (and therefore possess) too many personalities, there was the risk that one of the personas would wrest control of the body from the possessor.

In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal.

In William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer (1984), which popularized the concept of "cyberspace", a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete.

The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City (1994) and Diaspora (1997), "Copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed.

The Cylon Sharon Valerii is quoted in Battlestar Galactica as saying, "death becomes... a learning experience". This perhaps best summarizes the ethnological and tactical benefits of mind transfer (BSG episode, The Scar).

The movie The Matrix is commonly mistaken for a mind uploading movie, but is only about virtual reality and simulated reality, since the main character Neo's physical brain still is required to reside his mind. The mind (the information content of the brain) is not copied into an emulated brain in a computer. Neo's physical brain is connected into the Matrix via a brain-machine interface. Only the rest of the physical body is simulated. Neo is disconnected from and reconnected to this dreamworld.

James Cameron's 2009 movie Avatar has so far been the commercially most successful example of a work of fiction that deals with mind uploading. The hero slips into an artificially bred alien body, with his mind, for the sake of infiltrating an alien tribe so that this would leave its residence, but falls in love with a girl of the tribe and revolts against his military unit.

Further examples

Mind transfer is a theme in many other works of science fiction in a wide range of media. Specific examples include the following:

Literature

  • Frederik Pohl's story "The Tunnel Under the World" (1955).
  • Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question (1956).
  • Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956).
  • In the Noon Universe created by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the Great Encoding of 2121 was the first known attempt to completely store an individual's personality on an artificial medium. The final stages of the Encoding are described in the chapter 14 of Noon: 22nd Century (Candles Before the Control Board), first published in 1961.
  • Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series (1965–1993) introduces the villainous Bellers, who were laboratory machines designed to temporarily hold Lord's consciousness between clone bodies, which became sentient and self replicating.onto a Holopox unit shortly before being nuked by the KGB.
  • In Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light (1967), the characters can technologically "transmigrate" their minds into new bodies.
  • In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the beings controlling the monoliths were once alien lifeforms that had uploaded their minds into robotic bodies and finally into the fabric of space and time itself. The character Dave Bowman undergoes an uploading from the body of a human into a "ghost", as he is described in later books.
  • Bertil Mårtensson's novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968.
  • Robert Silverberg's novel To Live Again (1969).
  • Gene Wolfe's novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) features a robot named "Mr. Million" whose mind is an uploaded version of the original man who the narrator ('Number Five') was cloned from, and who acts as the narrator's tutor.
  • John Sladek's satirical The Muller-Fokker Effect (1973), in which a human mind could be recorded on cassette tapes and then imprinted on a human body using tailored viruses.
  • In an interesting reversal of the typical mind-transfer story, in Robert A Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973) a sentient computer transfers "her" mind into a genetically engineered human body.
  • The Wanderer's House (1976)[5] by a Russian author Alexander Mirer describes a variant of the theory - a world where the minds are of three types and the more subtle level of minds can be uploaded to a body without removing the other mind it possesses - it just overrides some of its functions.
  • Michael Berlyn's The Integrated Man (1980), where a human mind, or part of it (or even just a set of skills) can be encoded on a chip and inserted into a special socket at the base of the brain.
  • Rudy Rucker's novel Software (1982). See opening section for details.
  • In Heroes Unlimited (1984) under the Robot category, a human pilot has a transferred intelligence category that transfers a human intelligence over a distance into the body of a robot. This option is also available in Rifts Sourcebook 1. In either case it can be permanent.
  • William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984). See opening section for details.
  • Frederik Pohl's novel The Annals of the Heechee (1987) was the first in his Heechee series in which the protagonist Robinette Broadhead had been uploaded into a computer after his death.[6]
  • Larry Niven deals with mind-transfer in his short stories: memories from 'corpsicles' (cryogenically frozen bodies) are transferred to mindwiped criminals. In the novels The Smoke Ring (1987) and The Integral Trees (1984), a human is voluntarily 'translated' into a computer program to operate as a starship's guiding intelligence.
  • Iain M. Banks's Culture novels (1987-) make extensive reference to the transfer of mind-states.
  • Greg Bear's novel Eternity (1988) features a main character discovering a captured uploaded mind of a type of alien called a "Jart", whose civilization is later discovered to have the goal of uploading and digitizing as many minds and life-forms as possible with the hope of preserving them in a future "Final Mind" similar to Teilhard or Tipler's conception of the Omega Point. The story also features Bear's notion of the Taylor algorithms which allow a mentality to discover what type of system it is running on (for example, Bear writes on p. 109 that with these algorithms, "a downloaded mentality could tell whether or not it had been downloaded").
  • Janet Asimov's Mind Transfer (1988) journeys through the birth, life, death, and second life of a man whose family pioneers human-to-android mind transfer. It also explores the ethical and moral issues of transferring consciousness into an android at the moment of death, and examines the idea of prematurely activating an android which has not yet accepted a human brain scan.
  • Several characters in Kyle Allen's The Archon Conspiracy (1989) are repeatedly killed and resurrected in prosthetic bodies, once a "pattern map" of their brains is recovered and hard-wired into an artificial neural net. The main antagonist uses a similar process to construct a memetic computer virus, in the process uploading the personality of a notorious serial killer into several thousand people.
  • Roger MacBride Allen's The Modular Man (1992) portrays the interior experience of a personality copied into a vacuum cleaner and his legal battle for recognition as a legal personality. See also Political ideas in science fiction.
  • Peter James' Host (1993). A group of scientists is researching the feasibility of the upload to achieve immortality. Unfortunately it turns out that there are some unforeseen problems with the combination of human emotions and the power to use computers and the internet to manipulate the real world.
  • In the novel Feersum Endjinn (1994) by Iain M. Banks, the minds of the dead are uploaded into a computer network known as "the data corpus", "cryptosphere" or simply "crypt", allowing them to be routinely reincarnated. The story revolves around two characters who are trying to reactivate a piece of ancient technology, the "Fearsome Engine", which can prevent the Sun from dimming to the point where life on Earth becomes extinct.
  • Greg Egan's novel Permutation City (1994).
  • In Endgame (1996), the last novel of the Doom series by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver, the alien race known as Newbies attempts to transfer Fly Taggart's and Arlene Sanders's souls to a computer simulation based on their memories. However, due to difference between "formats" of human soul and soul of any other being in the galaxy, they accidentally copied their soul, with one copy trapped in the simulation and the other left in their bodies.
  • Greg Egan's novel Diaspora (1997).
  • In Garth Nix's Shade's Children (1997), Shade is an uploaded consciousness acting in loco parentis to teenagers to help save them from evil Overlords. Shade contemplates at times how human he is, especially as his personality degenerates during the story; and whether or not he should have a new human body.
  • In Charles Platt's novel The Silicon Man (1997), an FBI agent who has stumbled on a top-secret project called LifeScan is destructively uploaded against his will. Realistically describes the constraints of the process and machinery.
  • Tad Williams's Otherland quadrilogy (1998–2002) concerns the activities of a secret society whose goals include creating a virtual reality network where they will be uploaded and in which they will live as gods. Otherland contains a very hard SF approach to the topic, but balances the hard approach with fantastical adventures of the protagonists within the virtual reality network.
  • Gene Wolfe's trilogy The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001) features an old generation starship called the Whorl which is run by a group of uploaded rulers who have set themselves up as gods. Once the Whorl arrives at a star system with habitable planets, they send giant "godlings" to the humans on board to encourage them to depart the ship.
  • In Abduction (2000) by Robin Cook, a group of researchers discover an underwater civilization which achieved immortality by transferring their minds into cloned bodies.
  • In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe (2000-), a complete and functioning copy of the mind is described as an alpha-level simulation while a non-sentient copy of the mind based on predictive behavioural pattern of a person's mind is described as a beta-level simulation.
  • Kiln People (2002) by David Brin postulates a future where people can create clay duplicates of themselves with all their memories up to that time. The duplicates only last 24 hours, and the original can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto's memories back into himself afterward. Most people use dittos to do their work.
  • Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon (2002) and other Takeshi Kovacs books, where everyone has a "cortical stack" implanted at the base of their skull, soon after being born. The device then records all your memories and experiences in real-time. The stack can be "resleeved" in another body, be it a clone or otherwise, and/or backed up digitally at a remote location.
  • Vernor Vinge's novella "The Cookie Monster" (2003) explores the possibility of mind uploads who are not aware they have been uploaded, and who are kept as unknowing slaves doing technical research in a simulation running at high speed relative to the outside world.
  • In Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), the plot is set in motion when the main character is killed and "restored from backup", a process which entails the creation of a clone and flashing the clone's brain with an image stored on a computer.
  • In Carlos Atanes' FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004) the Sisterhood of Metacontrol transfer Angeline's consciousness into the virtual world of the Réseau Céleste.
  • Robert J. Sawyer's novel Mindscan (2005) deals with the issue of uploaded consciousness from the perspective of Jake Sullivan: both of them. The human Jake has a rare, life threatening disease and to extend his life he decides to upload his consciousness into a robotic body; but things don't go quite as planned.
  • In the Old Man's War series (2005-) by John Scalzi, the minds of volunteer retirees are transferred to younger, genetically enhanced versions of themselves in order to enable them to fight for the Colonial Defence Forces (CDF). In The Android's Dream, two characters' minds are uploaded onto computers.
  • In The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008) by Rick Riordan, Daedalus/Quintus transfers his mind to an automaton by means of a combination of mechanics and magic.
  • The book and podcast novel series 7th Son (2009) from JC Hutchins focuses purely on mind uploading and cloning. Combining two ethically situational sciences and turning it into a thriller series when a terrorist clone can copy his consciousness to other peoples minds.
  • In Peter F. Hamilton's The Void Trilogy humans are able to upload into the machine intelligence known as ANA.

Film

  • In the film The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), set in the future after a nuclear war, the blue-skinned androids known as "humanoids" are trying to infiltrate human society by creating android replicas of humans that have recently died, using a procedure called a "thalamic transplant" to take the memories and personality of the recently-deceased human and place them in the replicas.
  • In the film Tron (1982), human programmer Flynn is digitized by an artificial intelligence called the "Master Control Program", bringing him inside the virtual world of the computer.
  • Mamoru Oshii/Masamune Shirow's anime/manga Ghost in the Shell (1989-) portrays a future world in which human beings aggressively mechanize, replacing body and mind with interfacing mechanical/computer/electrical parts, often to the point of complete mechanization/replacement of all original material. Its sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence deals heavily with the philosophical ramifications of this problem.
  • The film The Lawnmower Man (1992) deals with attempts by scientists to boost the intelligence of a man named Jobe using a program of accelerated learning, using nootropic drugs, virtual reality input, and cortex stimulation. After becoming superintelligent, Jobe finds a way to transfer his mind completely into virtual reality, leaving his physical body as a wizened husk.
  • In the film The 6th Day (2000), the contents of a brain can be downloaded via the optic nerves, and copied to clones.
  • Chrysalis, a 2007 French movie about an experimental machine capable of partially uploading minds. Minds cannot function in purely digital form, they must be placed back into a human container.
  • The central conceit of the 2009 science fiction film Avatar is that human consciousness can be used to control genetically grown bodies (Avatars) based on the native inhabitants of an alien world, in order to integrate into their society. This is not true mind uploading, as the humans only control the Avatars remotely (a form of telepresence), but later in the film Grace connects with Eywa (the collective consciousness of the planet) so her mind can be permanently transferred to her Avatar body. Her mind is uploaded to Eywa, but she does not return to her Avatar body and stays within the Tree of Souls. At the end of the film, Jake's mind is uploaded to Eywa and successfully returns to his Avatar body leaving his human body lifeless.

Television

  • In the 1985 TV movie Max Headroom and ABC Television series, TV reporter Edison Carter is copied into Network 23's computers creating the TV personality Max Headroom.
  • Red Dwarf (1988–1999), where a person's memories and personality can be recorded in just a few seconds and, upon their death, they can be recreated as a holographic simulation. Arnold Rimmer is an example of such a person.
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Schizoid Man" (1989), Dr Ira Graves uploads his mind into Data's positronic brain. He later downloads his memories into the Enterprise's computer, although his personality has been lost.
  • In Battle Angel Alita (1990-, also known as Gunnm), a closely guarded secret of the elite city of Tiphares/Zalem is that its citizens, after being eugenically screened and rigorously tested in a maturity ritual, have their brains scanned, removed and replaced with chips. When this is revealed to a Tipharean/Zalem citizen, the internalized philosophical debate causes most citizens to go insane.
  • In the Phantom 2040 TV series (1994-) and videogame (1995), Maxwell Madison Sr., the husband of one of the series' main antagonists Rebecca Madison, is killed during a train wreck with the 23rd Phantom and his brainwaves are uploaded onto a computer mainframe. Rebecca plans to download his brainwaves into a living or artificial body to bring him back to life.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! (1996-), Noah Kaiba died in a car accident and his mind was uploaded to a supercomputer.
  • In the TV series Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007), the Asgard cheat death by transferring their minds into new clone bodies. The mind of Thor, the high commander of the Asgard fleet, was for a time transferred into the computer of a Goa'uld spaceship. In the episode "Tin Man" (1998), the SG-1 team visit a warehouse of an extinct alien civilization, where the android caretaker scans their minds and builds android duplicates of the team, who are unaware that they aren't the originals until they find their original bodies in suspended animation. In "Holiday" (1999) Dr. Daniel Jackson's mind is transferred into Machello's body and vice versa. In "Entity" (2001) Samantha Carter's mind is transferred into a computer. In "Lifeboat" (2003) around 12 minds are transferred into and then out of Daniel Jackson's body. In the two-part opening of season 8, "New Order" (2004), Jack O'Neal's mind is fully interfaced with Thor's computer.
  • The X-Files episode "Kill Switch" (1998) includes the uploading of human consciousness onto the Internet.
  • Cowboy Bebop Episode 23 "Brain Scratch" (1999) is about a cult dedicated towards electronic transference of the mind into a computer network.
  • In the French animated series Code Lyoko (2003-), the primary characters use devices called Scanners that read the entire physical makeup of the user, digitize their atoms and then teleport the user onto the virtual world of Lyoko.
  • The television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009) features human-like androids which, upon the destruction of their physical bodies, transfer their consciousness into another identical body somewhere else in the universe.
  • In the television series Caprica (2009–2010), a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, the ability to upload human consciousnesses into a virtual reality world is featured prominently. While some characters believe that the process only creates a imperfect copy of the original person, as the death of the original consciousness is unnecessary for the creation of the virtual copy, other characters believe that it can be viewed as a form of religious rebirth analogous to the afterlife.
  • Mind transfer is a central theme in the television series Dollhouse (2009–2010).
  • In the anime series "Serial Experiments Lain", the antagonist Masami Eiri embeds his memories and consciousness into the "Wired", the internet of the story universe. He believed that humanity should evolve by ridding themselves of their physical limitations and live as digital entities only.

Comics

Video games

  • In the computer game Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (1991) from Sierra Entertainment, the hero Roger Wilco is chased through time by an uploaded version of his old enemy Sludge Vohaul, whose consciousness has been stored on the missing floppies from a never-produced fourth installment of the Leisure Suit Larry series (also made by Sierra).
  • In Delphine Software's game Flashback (1992), the protagonist Conrad Hart discovers that the Morph alien race is plotting to invade Earth. Knowing that the Morphs will erase his memory if they discover that he knows about them, he copies his memory and records a message of himself in his holocube in case if his memory is erased. The Morphs, as Conrad feared, do discover this and erase his memory. The game focuses on Conrad recovering his memory and then defeating the Morphs.
  • In the Mega Man X video games (1993-), X's creator Doctor Light had uploaded his brainwaves into a computer before he died, and effectively "lives beyond the grave" as a sentient hologram that can communicate with X and Zero.
  • The computer game Independence War (1997), in which the player is assisted by a recreation of CNV-301 Dreadnought's former captain, who is bitter about having been recreated without his consent.
  • In the computer game Total Annihilation (1997), a multi-millennia war rages between a society mandating mind transfer and a rebellion against it.
  • In the iPhone RPG Chaos Rings (2010), a human named Theia transferred her consciousness and memories into the mainframe of the Ark Arena, a highly advanced spaceship and time-travelling machine, in order to oversee its activities.
  • In the MMO Eve Online (2003), players who die have their minds downloaded and transferred to a new clone through the galactic network at the moment before death. the brain is destroyed in the process, so the scan must be done the moment there is a breach in the escape pod.
  • In the computer game City of Heroes (2004-), the arch-villain known as Nemesis was born in Prussia during the 18th century, but has since then put his mind into a complex, steam-powered robotic body. Because of this, he has remained a threat to the heroes of Paragon City for close to two centuries.
  • In the video game Jak 3, the character Vic uploads his mind into a computer before he is killed.
  • In the Destroy All Humans! series (2005-), Orthopox 13 uploads a "copy of my [his] exquisite mind" onto a Holopox unit just before his ship is nuked by the KGB.
  • In the games Portal and Portal 2, the character GLaDOS is actually Aperture Science's CEO Cave Johnson's assistant Caroline, transferred into a computer. Cave originally opted for himself to be transferred into a computer, but died before it could happen, and hence Caroline was transferred instead. At the end of Portal, GLaDOS also claims to have Chell's brain "scanned and permanently backed up in case something terrible happens". GLaDOS then deletes the backup when Chell refuses to be murdered.
  • In the game Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006), the character Professor Hojo is revealed to have uploaded his consciousness into the worldwide network moments before his death in the original Final Fantasy VII (1997) as a means to survive the encounter with the protagonists and ultimately download himself into a new, stronger body 3 years later.
  • In the Metroid series (1986-), Samus Aran's commander and friend Adam had his brain uploaded to the Federation's network, like all well known scientists upon their death.

Other media

  • In the Rifts role-playing game Dimension Book 2: Phase World (1994), a member of an artificial race called the Machine People named Annie integrates her consciousness permanently with a spacecraft.
  • In the online collaborative world-building project "Orion's Arm" (2000-) the concepts of mind copying and uploading are used extensively, particularly in the online novel Betrayals.[7]
  • The award-winning RPG Transhuman Space (2002) tackles the mind-uploading issue with the concept of xoxing, which is the illegal perfect copy of a mind. Mind emulation is always destructive, so a living person cannot also exist in a digital form. Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent multiple digital versions from being simultaneously active. Law prohibits more than one active copy of a mind emulation at a time (security backups being considered inactive) and the RPG delves into the possible abuses of this (like cult leaders implanting a copy of their own mind in every cult followers' virtual interface).
  • The RPG Eclipse Phase takes place in a frightening future after a technological singularity in which AIs known as TITANs wiped out most humans and transhumans alive at the time, an event called "The Fall". Most of the survivors live in space, and have uploaded their personalities (or "egos") and can regularly switch between physical bodies ("morphs"), or inhabit simulated bodies ("infomorphs") in virtual environments. Duplication of uploaded personalities is also possible ("forking").

See also


References

  1. ^ Geraci, Robert M. (2010), Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, p. 54. Note however that although Geraci deems this the first story to feature mind uploading, he incorrectly gives the publication date as 1953, which is actually the publication date of the novel Against the Fall of Night which The City and the Stars was a revised version of.
  2. ^ Tofts, Darren and Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro (2004), Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, p. 253
  3. ^ Bainbridge, William Sims (2004), Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, p. 438.
  4. ^ Dinello, Daniel (2006), Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, p. 172.
  5. ^ translated title at http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks%3A1&tbo=1&q=%22alexander+mirer%22+wanderer+house&btnG=Search+Books and publication date in "Alexander Mirer" entry at http://www.gloss-science-fiction.de/funkkabine.htm
  6. ^ http://www.cybamuse.com/books/sf/pohl.htm
  7. ^ http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47213308abc1c Upload

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