At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.
In Needle, we are immediately thrust headlong into a chase, with one alien being, referred to as “Hunter”, pursuing another one as they crash into the sea on Earth. We quickly find out that Hunter is a law enforcement agent gunning after a criminal from his planet, and also a small amoeboid organism that symbiotically joins with another animal to survive. With his ship destroyed and his host dead, Hunter is forced outside to find another body to live in—the first chapters give a pretty good idea of how the entire novel will be structured, which in classic Golden Age SF fashion, is as a series of logic problems that explain every facet of the book’s core idea. After joining with a shark and then watching it die because the Hunter’s own cells require too much oxygen, the alien finds a beach, and then a human that he immediately joins with so he can continue his search for the criminal—then gets hit with a complication, which is that his human host gets on a plane and flies to a different country. Whoops! The Hunter’s new host is a fifteen-year-old named Robert, whose family lives on an island in the Pacific, but who goes to school in New England. Over several chapters, the Hunter acclimates to his host’s life, finds a way to communicate with him (which includes a somewhat weird and somewhat adorable scene where the Hunter gets out of Robert’s body and then writes a note with a pencil), and then the two try to figure out how to get Robert back to the island so they can figure out what happened to the criminal. When they do get back to the island, it then becomes a whodunnit pastiche, where Hunter and Robert have to gradually piece together where the criminal went, and more specifically, who he’s hiding out in. As the title suggests, this is no easy task when any person could potentially be the host.
Between all the conversations Hunter and Robert have (the kid does seem to accept this alien living inside his bloodstream pretty quickly), nearly every question about how their symbiotic relationship works is answered: how they can talk without people looking at Robert askance, what the Hunter eats, how he is affected by disease, which injuries he can and cannot heal or numb (and whether Robert starts acting more careless when he knows he has an alien that can stop him from feeling pain), and other sorts of minutiae. When they begin their detective work (in between scenes of normal teenage boy activities, like riding bikes, boat repair, and impaling a leg on sharp buried sticks), they then have long conversations about whether any of Robert’s friends could have picked up the alien outlaw, and the various tests they could use to draw their quarry out in the open. Despite how out there and exciting the premise is on the surface, this is a very talky book, essentially a series of questions and answers about the mystery at hand or about the Hunter’s alien biology until the the important solutions to major problems are determined (the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the book “rather ponderous”, which is accurate.) It’s pretty easy to tell that Clement put a lot of thought into how Hunter lives, and has some ideas about what it’s like to be a symbiote in a host with a life of its own (he is a rather composed for a squishy alien blob, and despite being annoyed or impatient when Robert gets distracted by fifteen-year-old boy stuff, he never gets too angry), but it’s also very clean-cut, almost clinical in sketching out their relationship. Despite the more visceral ideas behind Needle, it never moves into anything resembling body horror (unless you count some of the surprisingly gnarly injuries Robert sustains), or even get into anything psychological about what it must be like to have another intelligent organism inside you with the ability to control your body, aside from some early scenes where Robert freaks out when his limbs start moving on their own. It’s a weird idea, but maybe because it’s a book aimed at kids from 1950, it simply can’t get too weird—I mean, it ends with a joke about how Hunter will have to use his pain-inhibiting abilities when Robert’s dad gets a hankerin’ for a spankerin’. Okay, maybe it just gets weird in non-alien-related ways.
Although Needle never goes all the way with its freaky biological underpinnings (I don’t know what the few follow-up stories that Clement wrote add, having not read them), it still has a great idea at its core (a combination of symbiotic aliens and a semi-paranoid mystery dynamic) that others have ended up running with. One that was directly inspired by Clement’s novel (and actually acknowledges it rather than just hoping no one notices the rip-off, like the cult eighties action thriller The Hidden did) is Nobuaki Tadano’s four volume manga series 7 Billion Needles, which takes the basic premise and expands upon its physical and emotional implications. Being published from 2008-2010 in Japan obviously required some changes from the original, so the manga substitutes fifteen-year-old American boy Robert with fifteen-year-old Japanese girl Hikaru, and modern technology plays an important role in the story. The manga is also significantly more violent than the quaint 1950 original, beginning with its opening pages—whereas Robert’s bonding with his alien pal goes unnoticed, Hikaru is accidentally vaporized by the alien’s arrival, only to be rebuilt with only vague memories of what happened (shades of Ultraman added in that origin.) This is a good indicator of just how willing 7 Billion Needles is to dip into the more horrific side of the symbiotic relationship.
There are other key differences in the story, which deviates more and more as it goes along. Where Robert seemed to be mostly well-adjusted, Hikaru is an emotionally distant loner who uses her MP3 player and headphones to shut out the rest of the world (Tadano always fills wide panels with snippets of pointless chatter, which is at its most prominent in the early chapters.) Being joined by the alien, in this case an energy being dubbed Horizon, automatically forces her out of her introversion, and she is unwillingly made to further venture outside her comfort zone when they go out looking for the other alien, called Maelstrom, which involves her talking to all her classmates so they can find signs of its presence. Unlike the motivation-free amoeba criminal in Needle, Maelstrom is a malignant entity that apparently goes from planet to planet murdering every organism it can find before Horizon inevitably tracks it down, and the brutality is used effectively here—blood, severed limbs (Hikaru suffers worse injuries than Robert ever did), and flesh melting and congealing into gigantic blobs made of mixed people and animals really bring the gruesomeness, and in the first two books it makes the search for Maelstrom feel significantly more urgent. Despite the grossness and violence, though, the most impacting parts of the story are the emotional journey Hikaru goes on, learning how to connect with people and make friends, and then confronting the trauma at the centre of her misanthropic behaviour. There’s an island home in this one, too, but in complete contrast to Needle it is a place of terrible childhood memories, and Tadano’s portrayal of petty, mean-spirited townies is believable and makes Hikaru’s decision to rise above the source of her anger feel very satisfying. She even gets a moment where she symbolically rejects a very Cronenberg-esque pair of fleshy headphones.
That’s all in the first two books, but beginning with the end of book two, the narrative changes in a big way—rather than destroy its enemy as usual, Horizon instead absorbs Malestrom, meaning Hikaru is now sharing a body with two different aliens. The story then becomes about the three of them dealing with an outbreak of mutations among random organisms, which seems to be a side effect of the aliens’ presence on Earth. This calls yet another extraterrestrial being to our planet, one who calls himself the Moderator and begins taking sample life forms and then depositing them into a huge organic thunderdome to see what comes out, basically as a controlled form of high-speed evolution. We learn that Horizon, Maelstrom, and the Moderator are all part of some universal natural order, and that the two alien rivals learning about the endless nature of their conflict and deciding to change may have upset the balance, which the Moderator is now trying to “correct” by determining if life on Earth should be reset to its base components. It gets into very heady concepts of the nature of evolution and how it relates to individuality (the Moderator often seems less like a natural being and more like a scientist with a rigid idea of How Things Should Be), the actual core of the story is the relationship between Hikaru and another lonely girl she recognizes as going through the same heartache she had. By the end of the series, the symbiote-host dynamic becomes a reminder that one of our greatest strengths as a species is how we can come together and help one another, and also that change is always possible, rejecting the deterministic view of life. It’s a surprisingly touching conclusion to what on the surface seems like a gooey bit of Sci-Fi horror.
The deeper parallels between Needle and 7 Billion Needles are few, but fun to spot (I actually read the latter before the former, so I was technically seeing them in reverse), but the really interesting part is how Tadano took Clement’s ideas and not only took them farther in conceptual terms, but gave them the emotional heft that they lacked before. Symbiosis provides for a very meaty high concept for Science Fiction, and as it turned out, it also provided material for an affecting character study. It may not have the rigorously parsed out science, but maybe there’s more to storytelling than just rigorously parsed out science.
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