I’m not sure where to post this, but since this seems to be initially a creation of the movies, this seems like the appropriate forum.
I’ve been fascinated by a concept that appears to have been born in the cinema, although it’s bled out into other forms of pop culture. I can’t think of any examples in science fiction literature prior to what I’m going to say, or – even better - in Real Life. Although I’d be grateful if anyone could point to pre-movie examples.
What I’m thinking about is an Autonomous Living Item that is created to establish one desired goal, then dies. It’s not really a creature in its own right, since is always created by the parent unit, doesn’t feed or reproduce on its own, and has a circumscribed period of existence. It can’t really exist on its own, or without the parent. As far as I know, there’s nothing like this in the real world – any examples I come up with end up requiring special pleading.
The first case I can think of were the “Inject-a-Pods” from the Roger Corman’s 1956 opus It Conquered the World That’s the one with the creature from Venus that’s shaped like a teepee with giant crab-claws and a stupidly evil grinning face. It gains control of people by emitting “inject-a-pods” that look like bats, little autonomous flying units whose only purpose is to inject some sort of control mechanism into people, after which they are subject to the Venusian’s will. Both the Venusianand the inject-a-pods were manufactured for the film by Corman’s favorite low-budget creature maker, Paul Blaisdell. The screenwriters were LouRusoff and an uncredited Charles B. Griffith (who acted in the movie), so I guess they’re the guys we have to thank for this concept.*
Inject-a-pod in upper left:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Blaisdell+Inject+a+pod+It+Conquered+the+World&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj8nMuGq_PYAhVFnuAKHRBtAokQ_AUICigB&biw=1440&bih=729#imgrc=LTLx47rNBOhj9M:&spf=1516890928852
The Autonomous Biological Unit (ABU) got its next outing with the movie Alien, this time with the goal of injecting the embryonic monster into the host. the Face Hugger looks like two hands stuck together at the wrist, with a long tail and a scrotal sac. It was designed by H.R. Giger for Ridley Scott’s film (I’ve long felt that Alien would not have been the success it was were it not for Giger’s visual design). This is what sits in the Alien egg, and it’s clearly alive enough to seek out and pounce on a victim, then fight off attempts to dislodge it. It’s a clever bit of pseudobiology, in that it implants its creature, then dies and leaves its victim apparently well and unharmed, allowing the victim to carry the “infection” into a mass of its fellow beings. It’s the kind of reproductive strategy that would probably work, if this was a Real Life thing, but as far as I know, it isn’t.
As far as I know, nobody said anything about this at the time the film came out, but it’s really a pretty revolutionary concept. After all the Alien films in the franchise, all of them using this idea, people have pretty much come to take it for granted. But it’s a pretty significant idea.
Xtro, a 1982 film building on the success of Alien, has several variations on the ABU concept, but it’s not very coherent.
A better use of it came with the 2006 film Slither, which was sort of a “throw all the tropes in a blender and see which ones stick” kind of film that used concepts from Alien, The Blob, Night of the Living Dead, and others in a sort of hodgepodge of horror. The trouble starts, as in The Blob, with a meteorite, from which emerges a sluglike creature that crawls along until a likely victim comes along, in which it shoots an impregnating dart. So the slug is a reproductive ABU. Later in the film, the altered victim alters a woman to become a bioreactor creating a mass of slugs that act like the inject-a-pods, turning people they attack into controlled slaves, so it also has that kind of ABU.
The idea was used again in the 2012 film Prometheus, which is part of the Alien universe, but where the ABU isn’t a face-hugger, but the octopus-like creature that gestates inside Elizabeth Shaw after she has sex with Charlie Holloway, who has been infected by alien goo for no apparent reason by the android David. Shaw gets the thing out of her abdomen using an autodoc, but it survives and, at the film’s end it attacks the Engineer and implants an alien-like embryo insid him. Clearly, despite its weird-ass lifecycle, the octopus-like thing is an ABU and the Alien-clone the intended lifeform.
There are undoubtedly other examples, and not just in Alien-derived movies, books, and comics. The idea, like an ABU, has taken on a life of its own, at least long enough to infest other media.
Does anyone know of any prior examples in film or literature? Or any examples in the real world? (And don’t tell me that a beehive is like this – there’s a huge difference between a Queen Bee with her drones and workers and the ABU with its Host. Nor about termites, or about the weird way that fungi and parasites can “reprogram” animals to act differently. There’s no ABU there at all.)
*The inject-a-pods differ from prior “mind control” alien monsters in that it’s not them doing the controlling. Heinlein’s “slugs” in The Puppet Masters continue to ride on their slaves’ backs, and each is a unique individual when not tied in with the others, although they connect to form a shared hive-mind. Finney’s “Body Snatchers” start as seed pods, but that’s clearly the “larval form” of the final creature – the pod isn’t a separate temporary creature
