William Sleator has written numerous science fiction books, but three books in particular deal either with mind control or aliens. In Interstellar Pig, Barney becomes involved in playing a game about rival aliens who will stop at nothing to destroy every other creature in the universe. He soon discovers that it is not just a game. In House of Stairs, five sixteen-year-old orphans are placed in a house of endless stairs and subjected to experiments on conditioned human response, a type of mind control.

Monica Hughes's Invitation to the Game also looks at mind control in the year 2154 when a group of unemployed teenagers are invited to play a computer game but soon find out that it is not necessarily a game.