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Sci-Fi Radio 17 - Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson
This would be the tale of a crippled man who controls an alien body thanks to mind-link/possession that if it turned out to be in James Cameron's library would surprise me not a bit. That said, the original "Call Me Joe" is from 1957 and it bears a number of points of similarity with Simak's 1944 story "Desertion:; both involve exploring/exploiting Jupiter, both involve the use of alien bodies to do this and both have similar conclusions. With Anderson's, though, you get a large serving of how horrible it is to be a cripple, in the end a life not worth living at all.
There's also a detail I completely forget: the original plan is to settle a group of intelligent beings on Jupiter with the most rudimentary tools* to work away on the surface under a priesthood of remotely controlled pawns of the humans, for the benefit of the humans. Nobody ever questions whether creating a race to effectively enslave them may have a moral angle. Science Fiction: come for the pseudoscience, stay for the pathological politics.
* There's a bit at the end where Cornelius predicts Joe will call the station in Jupiter V as soon as he builds a radio. Joe's tools consist of his bare hands at that point. I think Cornelius is being optimistic.
This would be the tale of a crippled man who controls an alien body thanks to mind-link/possession that if it turned out to be in James Cameron's library would surprise me not a bit. That said, the original "Call Me Joe" is from 1957 and it bears a number of points of similarity with Simak's 1944 story "Desertion:; both involve exploring/exploiting Jupiter, both involve the use of alien bodies to do this and both have similar conclusions. With Anderson's, though, you get a large serving of how horrible it is to be a cripple, in the end a life not worth living at all.
There's also a detail I completely forget: the original plan is to settle a group of intelligent beings on Jupiter with the most rudimentary tools* to work away on the surface under a priesthood of remotely controlled pawns of the humans, for the benefit of the humans. Nobody ever questions whether creating a race to effectively enslave them may have a moral angle. Science Fiction: come for the pseudoscience, stay for the pathological politics.
* There's a bit at the end where Cornelius predicts Joe will call the station in Jupiter V as soon as he builds a radio. Joe's tools consist of his bare hands at that point. I think Cornelius is being optimistic.
