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This was a story from an anthology. A man is trapped in an alien blob on a planet. I think his mom or some team member tries to rescue him, by the time she manages, he is so happy living inside the creature that he does not flee with her. By that time he looks like a blob himself. And I think the mother dies and he doesn’t care.

It was just those two people finding the creature, maybe one more to demonstrate what the creature does.

I checked every blob and absorbed and mother post, no luck.

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  • Perhaps Damon Knight's "Four in One"?
    – Otis
    Nov 11, 2019 at 2:34
  • It’s not “Four in one”, although I saw that as searched story in this forum and really want to read it! It was only one person absorbed at a time. Thanks anyway!
    – Axelerate
    Nov 12, 2019 at 7:31

1 Answer 1

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That could be "Mother" by Philip Jose Farmer. This collection appears to contain the full story.

In that, the "blob" was a giant sessile animal whose slug-like larvae crawled around inside it until they were ready to leave. After some time living among the larvae and communicating with the parent creature, the man sees it capture and eat his mother, leaving him as the only surviving human on the planet.

That event seemed to push him over the edge, and although his mother gave him a means of escape he ended up accepting his situation and staying in the creature. He gained weight and lost his hair until he looked like one of the larvae.

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    That sounds exactly like it! Thank you so much! I will check it out later.
    – Axelerate
    Nov 14, 2019 at 12:00

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