Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites

Colin Wilson’s novel The Mind Parasites appeared in 1967. Wilson is one of the most intriguing, baffling, controversial figures in 20th century literature, and one of the strangest. You cannot review a Colin Wilson novel without saying something about his ideas and his philosophy because his novels are extended meditations on those ideas and philosophies but it is difficult to explain Wilson’s thought without writing an entire book on it. So I apologise in advance if my brief attempt proves to be pitifully inadequate.

Wilson gained overnight fame at the age of 24 with his non-fiction book The Outsider. Wilson used the term outsider in a particular sense, to describe literary figures who were not so much social outsiders as intellectual outsiders. Wilson certainly saw himself in that light. Wilson was an existentialist but I would describe him as a Wilsonian existentialist. Even among intellectual outsiders Wilson was an outsider.

Wilson developed an increasing interest in the occult and the paranormal, but again he did so in a characteristically Wilsonian way. While others disagreed he also always maintained that his approach to these subjects was scientific.

In the early 60s he discovered Lovecraft. This discovery blew his mind, as they used to say in the 60s. He always had certain reservations about Lovecraft but he recognised him as an incredibly important writer and one of the key literary figures of modern times. The Mind Parasites was Wilson’s response to this discovery. That is not to imply that this is a Lovecraft pastiche. Wilson was not the kind of writer to produce a mere pastiche. There are lots of other things going on in The Mind Parasites, lots of other intellectual interests and speculations coming together, but Lovecraft was the initial catalyst. And you will find major elements here borrowed from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

The Mind Parasites is ostensibly written in the fairly distant future, apparently the early 22nd century, but it concerns events of the 1990s. So already we’re dealing with some games involving the past, the present and the future.

The narrator, Dr Gilbert Austin, is an archaeologist. He is puzzled by some excavations, and by some figures. In the future world of this novel it is possible to date archaeological finds with extreme precision. There is absolutely no doubt about the dating of these finds. There is no possibility of error. And yet the dates are impossible. Not just impossible by a few centuries, but impossible by many thousands of years. Dr Austin has to consider the possibility that everything we thought we knew about the past is wrong.

And then there are those inscriptions. They’re not just vaguely Lovecraftian. They are drawn directly from Lovecraft’s works, and yet they are thousands of years old. Could it be that Lovecraft thought he was writing fiction but was in fact writing historical fact?

And then the mind parasites strike. And the novel becomes much much weirder. The mind parasites are inside people’s minds, but they are not products of the human mind. They come from somewhere else. Dr Austin’s archaeological finds have cast doubt on our understanding of the distant past. The discovery of the mind parasites casts doubts on our understanding of the recent past, and the present, and the nature of reality and consciousness. The mind parasites are also a very real and terrifying threat.

This book just keeps getting weirder. I haven’t mentioned the wild stuff about the Moon yet.

The key to this book is not the Lovecraftian stuff but Wilson’s interest in the workings of the mind. His ideas naturally are heavily slanted towards the paranormal and fringe science but with a good helping of psychoanalysis and some esoteric notions about the unconscious. He sees the unconscious mind as an entire universe, and the exploration of that universe as being far more interesting than the exploration of outer space or any kind of conventional mainstream science.

Wilson would take a fringe idea and push it as far as any reasonable person would dare, and then push it a whole lot further. For Wilson there were no limits.

There’s plenty of action, there are epic battles, but all taking place inside people’s minds.

The Mind Parasites is simply unlike any other science fiction novel but it is fascinating and it is highly recommended for its extreme weirdness.