The Senders

The Senders are a faction in Interzone defined by the attempt to control others through one-way mental transmission. Their doctrine turns communication into command: the transmitter acts, the subject receives, and reciprocity is treated as a threat to the sender’s continuity. The novel presents this arrangement not as stable power but as a self-consuming system, linking the faction’s politics to technological control and, ultimately, to the image of the Human Virus.

Identity and Political Position

The Senders are contrasted with the Liquefactionists and the Divisionists, but their defining distinction is less a program of collective absorption or replication than an asymmetry between transmitting and receiving. They are described as notorious for ignorance about the nature and final condition of sending, as well as for self-righteous conduct and fear of facts. Only a small number understand what they are doing; those highest in the hierarchy are presented as especially dangerous. The Factualists oppose the Senders above all, making resistance to one-way control the clearest point of political opposition.

The account does not treat the factions as wholly separate in practice: their positions can blend in different combinations. Even so, the Senders represent a particularly stark danger because their method would reduce another person’s mental and emotional life to something acted upon from outside. Their political identity is thus inseparable from a theory of communication in which the ability to transmit is concentrated and the ability to answer is suppressed.

Biocontrol and the Technology of Sending

At a National Electronic Conference in Chicago, a speaker warns that encephalographic research could lead to biocontrol: the direction of physical movement, mental processes, emotional reactions, and apparent sensory impressions through bioelectric signals injected into a subject’s nervous system. The proposed machinery makes the political principle tangible. A surgeon could install connections in a brain shortly after birth, allowing a miniature radio receiver to be plugged in and the subject controlled by transmitters operated by the state.

The speech presents the biocontrol apparatus as a prototype for one-way telepathic control, but also says that susceptibility could be produced through drugs or other processing without installing hardware. The predicted endpoint is exclusive reliance on telepathic transmission. The apparatus therefore stands both for a specific imagined technology and for a broader method: the body can be prepared to receive commands, whether through an implanted interface or through other forms of conditioning. In either case, the subject’s apparent perceptions and reactions become vulnerable to someone else’s signal.

The Sender’s Isolation and the Centipede Parable

The lecture explains sending as a condition that cannot be sustained by contact. A Sender must transmit continuously and cannot receive, because receiving would mean encountering another person’s independent feelings and risking a break in the sender’s continuity. Yet someone who never receives cannot replenish what is being sent. The doctrine thus contains its own limit: transmission consumes the capacity on which further transmission depends. The account also insists that there can be only one Sender at a given place and time, giving this solitary role a monopoly over the channel even as it deprives its holder of reciprocal connection.

A screen then turns the argument into a parable. The Sender becomes a giant centipede; workers arrive by way of the beam, burn it, and choose a new Sender by general consent. The cycle makes the controlling figure replaceable rather than permanent: a new authority takes the place of the one destroyed. The lecture extends the image from the Mayans, whose isolation limited their system, to the possibility that one Sender could control the planet. Its conclusion is that control cannot serve a practical end beyond producing more control. The comparison to addiction gives the political mechanism a compulsive structure: the system does not reach a goal outside itself but repeats its own demand.

The Human Virus and the Factualist Counterposition

The later account rejects the idea that the Sender is simply an individual human being. It names the Sender as the Human Virus, a parasitic and deteriorated image of a species, and places the figure within a wider field of social symptoms: poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, and insanity. The language shifts the focus from a particular controller to a pattern that can move through society cell by cell. It also changes the apparent scale of the problem: the danger is not only a person issuing commands but a process reproduced across institutions and collective life.

The Factualists’ opposition supplies a counterposition to this process. They reject one-way telepathic broadcasting as coercive and insist that telepathy is not inherently one-way. In their view, the attempt to impose unilateral transmission is evil because it controls and diminishes another living being’s individuality. The text also states that the Human Virus can now be isolated and treated. That claim leaves the account with a possible response, but not an account of its practical implementation: diagnosis and treatment are asserted, while the emphasis remains on recognizing the viral pattern in social power.

Narrative Role and Significance

The Senders’ portrait unfolds through several registers rather than a single character arc: political commentary, a technical warning, a screen parable, and a theory of social pathology. The movement from brain receivers and state transmitters to an isolated Sender, then to the centipede and the Human Virus, repeatedly changes the scale of the image while preserving its central asymmetry. Control first appears as an engineered intervention in individual bodies; it then becomes an impoverished relation that cannot replenish itself; finally, it appears as a social contagion.

This layered treatment makes the Senders significant as more than a faction in Interzone’s political landscape. They embody the danger of confusing communication with power over another, and of treating reception as weakness rather than the condition for reciprocal contact. Their system promises reach without dependence, but the account presents that promise as a route to exhaustion and endless repetition. The faction’s defining act—sending without receiving—thus becomes both its political method and the source of its failure.