“Favorite Stories of Hypnotism” is a classic collection of, of course, stories that involve hypnotism. However, that book was published in 1965 and was dated even then. I think it would be interesting to try to put the sequel together. But what would be included?
I would start with the following: about every one of these I listed below are either SF or fantasy, but, as in the original collection, they do not have to be so limited. Even though some of the SF stories are mysteries, too, I would like some regular mystery stories, as well, maybe even a romance story, too, just to cover the range.
- ‘Crisis: 1999’ by Fredric Brown — Police discover a strange phenomenon: criminals are getting fewer in number and they can’t figture out why.
- ‘Daymare’ by Fredric Brown — An investigator discovers a mind controller quickly moving up the in poltical world, taking complete control as he goes.
- ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ by Ray Nelson
- ‘The Key to the Temple of Heaven’ by Sax Rohmer — One of Sax Rohmer’s Madame de Medici stories. Madame de Medici was one of Rohmer’s stock hypnotically seductive women who used her hypnotic wiles and powers to influence men into doing her bidding. I also feel that Sax Rohmer should be represented here and the rest of his writing is novel length and too long for the collection. I am including this one because I have not been able to find a copy of any of the other de Medici stories.
- ‘Looking for Something’ by Frank Herbert
- ‘Mesmerica’ by Eric Frank Russell — Explorers on an alien world see things differently as they are mentally influenced by the alien ecology
- ‘Mission: Hypnosis’ by Harlan Ellison — A spy is hypnotized to aid his covert activity.
- ‘Poor Superman’ by Fritz Leiber — A mind controller gets his comeuppance.
- ‘Rogue Psi’ by James Schmitz — Telepathic hypnosis, by one of the masters of stories with telepathy and telepathic mind control themes. Here a master psychic has been stifling the space program because it would allow people to escape his world-wide control.
- ‘The Servant Problem’ by William Tenn — In a future society, who is controlling whom?
- ‘The Telzey Toy’ by James Schmitz — I should also include a Schmitz story involving Telzey Amberdon.
Any further suggestions?
Rohmer wrote another Madame de Medici story called The Black Mandarin, which features in a collection of short stories called Tales of East & West.
There’s also an anthology of medical-related stories with an interesting hypnosis story in it. I’ll need to look the book and other details out — more soon…
I included ‘The Key to the Temple of Heaven’ because I was able to find a copy of it online but I have never found the other, either online or for sale. This one does have the requisite (and stereotypical) hypnosis scene that I want to include, but if the other one presents it better I could change my mind.
The scene is narrated in the first person (like a lot of Rohmer’s stories) by a friend of Paul Harley, who is unprepared for an encounter with MdM, and consequently falls quite heavily. A nice scene in keeping with Rohmer’s take on being hypnotically overwhelmed.
Second-hand copies seem quite expensive on Abebooks.
The other story I was thinking of I think you might have included in your old HiM site — ‘Outpatient’ by Rosalind Warren, from an anthology called ‘Vital Lines’. It’s only 6 pages and suggests a quite cartoony take on the subject.