Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain is a 1987 science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov about a group of scientists that shrink to microscopic size in order to enter a human brain so that they can retrieve memories from a comatose colleague.
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The title makes it sound as if it is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage, the official novelization Asimov wrote (with minor changes to fix plot holes) for the 1966 film; but because Asimov did not have rights to the film's characters, it shares only the central concept of scientists shrinking to enter a human body for medical and political reasons, and the novel is actually a retelling of the original story with different characters as well as many detailed plot refinements.
In the novel, minituarization is achieved by using massive inputs of energy to reduce Planck's constant, thus allowing the atoms of substances within the minituarization field to reduce in size. The scientists creating the minituarization field theorize that it would be possible to couple Planck's constant to the speed of light and that the speed of light would increase as Planck's constant decrease. Thus, by refining the minituarization process by coupling it to the speed of light, it would be possible to do it using less energy and also achieve an inertialess drive for interstellar travel, according to the premise of the novel. It is believed that the comatose colleague has calculated the formula for doing this, thus the motivation for entering his brain and attempting to retrieve his memory of the formula.
The voyage takes place in a fictional mid- to late-21st century Soviet Union, inside the comatose body of an eccentric Soviet scientist, Dr. Pyotor Leonovich Shapirov, whose memories his colleagues intend to examine to discover the means of easing mass miniaturization. Its protagonist is Dr. Albert Jonas Morrison, an American scientist coerced to join the voyage in the hope of using his telepathic computer to reach Shapirov's memory. This mission fails; but on return to America, Morrison suggests to the intelligence agencies there that his own computer may be used in re-creating Shapirov's discovery.
This novel is implied to be included in the Robot/Foundation series' fictional universe--on page 327 of the novel, an American scientist describes fictional components of a robotic positronic brain.
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