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Title: Drug themes in science fiction

Author: Robert Silverberg

Author of introduction, etc.: Dan J. Lettieri

Illustrator: William Blake

Release date: October 26, 2025 [eBook #77131]

Language: English

Original publication: Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1974

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77131

Credits: Tim Lindell, Quentin Campbell, Thiers Halliwell (cover image restoration), North Dakota State University and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION ***

Transcriber’s Note

The cover image was restored by Thiers Halliwell and is granted to the public domain.

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RESEARCH ISSUES SERIES

1. Drugs and Employment

2. Drugs and Sex

3. Drugs and Attitude Change

4. Drugs and Family/Peer Influence

5. Drugs and Pregnancy

6. Drugs and Death

7. Drugs and Addict Lifestyles

8. A Cocaine Bibliography—Nonannotated

9. Drug Themes in Science Fiction

10. Drug Themes in Fiction

Cover Illustration

William Blake. The figure of Urizen or the Ancient of Days.

Frontispiece from Europe. Illuminated printing.

DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION

by

Robert Silverberg

November 1974

National Institute on Drug Abuse

11400 Rockville Pike

Rockville, Maryland 20852

This volume, part of a Research Issues Series, was prepared for the National Institute on Drug Abuse by Documentation Associates, Box 25892, Los Angeles, California,

under Contract Number HSM-42-73-222.

DHEW Publication No. (ADM) 75-190

Printed 1975

FOREWORD

The issues of drug use and abuse have generated many volumes of words, all written in an attempt to explain the “problem” and suggest the “solution.” Data have been generated by researchers from many disciplines, each looking at a particular aspect of an issue. The present booklet is one of a new series intended to aid researchers who find it difficult to find the time to scan, let alone read all the information which exists and which continues to be published daily in their area of interest. An attempt has been made to focus predominantly on empirical research findings and major theoretical approaches.

Included in volumes 1 through 7 of the series are summaries of the major research findings of the last 15 years, formulated and detailed to provide the reader with the purpose, methodology, findings and conclusions of previous studies done in the topic area. Each topic was chosen because it represented a challenging issue of current interest to the research community. As additional issues are identified, the relevant research will be published as part of this series.

Several of the volumes in the series represent a departure from the above description. These also represent challenging issues, and issues of current interest; they are, however, virtually unexplored areas which have received little attention from the research world. For example, the subjects of drugs and the visual arts, science fiction, and fiction—aspects of contemporary life which impact on all of us—are explored here by writers who have been deeply involved in those fields. Their content is perhaps provocative, and certainly stimulating.

The Research Issues series is a group project of staff members of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Division of Research, Behavioral and Social Sciences Branch. Special thanks are due to the continued guidance and support of Dr. Louise Richards and Dr. Norman Krasnegor. Selection of articles for inclusion was greatly aided by the suggestions of a peer review group, researchers themselves, each of whom reviewed a topic of particular interest. It is my pleasure to acknowledge their contribution to the project here.

Dan J. Lettieri, Ph. D.

Project Officer

National Institute on Drug Abuse

Robert Silverberg is the author of many science-fiction novels, including The Masks of Time, Son of Man, A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, and others, as well as numerous short stories. He has won two Hugo Awards and three Nebulas for novel and short story. He is a past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Mr. Silverberg has also written several non-fiction books on historical and archaeological subjects, including The Pueblo Revolt, Mound Builders of Ancient America, The Challenge of Climate, and The Realm of Prester John. Born and educated in New York City, Mr. Silverberg now lives in Oakland, California.

PREFACE

The explosive upsurge in the use of mind-altering drugs by middle-class Americans in the past decade has been a conspicuous and much-discussed phenomenon of our times. Beginning in the mid-1960’s and peaking, perhaps, about 1970, the use of marijuana, LSD, and even heroin has taken on the character of an epidemic, not only among the young but among many citizens of mature years. Though at present the spread of heroin addiction appears to be once more confining itself to low-income groups and LSD has become less fashionable among the experimental-minded, certainly marijuana has established itself as an almost universal drug used regularly by millions of Americans, and use of more potent mind-alterers remains heavy if no longer greatly accelerating.

During the period of social dislocation—marked by radical changes in styles of clothing and dress, assassinations of political leaders, disruption of the governmental processes as a response to a war commonly seen as immoral, rampant inflation, and other traumas and upheavals—that corresponds to the spread of drug use in the United States, science fiction has become one of the most popular specialized subgenres of literature. Once the obscure amusement of a few thousand cultists, science fiction is now read by millions; such novelists as Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Crichton, and others have reached the best-seller lists with works of science fiction; motion pictures such as 2001 have won wide audiences and science fiction has been conspicuous in the theater and in the themes of popular music. While this increase in the popularity of science fiction is in part a response to the wide publicity accorded the space explorations of the United States and the Soviet Union, I think it is much more to be ascribed to some of the same forces that have stimulated so much interest in drug-taking. That is, in a period of social upheaval such as we have experienced since the death of John F. Kennedy and the escalation of the Vietnamese war, conventional modes of behavior lose their appeal, and fascination with the bizarre, the alien, the unfamiliar, the strange, with all sorts of stimulation that provide escape from the realities of the moment, increases at a great rate. Science fiction not only offers those values in abundance but also, in its facet as satirical commentary on the here-and-now world, provides a perspective on our rapid social changes that has great appeal to readers, especially the young.

Surveys have shown that the audience for science fiction is primarily adolescent and above-average in intelligence; most of the readers are between 15 and 25 years of age (though of course some remain addicts of the genre throughout their lives). Therefore, there is great correspondence between the main drug-using and science-fiction-reading segments of the population, and it is worthwhile to examine science fiction for insights into the use of mind-altering drugs and for views of what drug use may lie in the future.

For the present research project I have compiled a group of English-language short stories and novels which deal with the use of mind-altering drugs, all written since 1900 and falling within the literary category of science fiction. I have avoided inclusion of that large body of stories dealing with drugs whose effects are primarily on the body rather than the mind: immortality serums, for example. Some of these stories date from the earliest years of the science-fiction genre, notably from the 1920’s and 1930’s when mass-market science-fiction magazines first began publication. Not surprisingly, however, the majority of the stories within the study date from the post-1965 period, when the use of drugs first pervaded the national life to its present extent. For reasons explained in the accompanying introductory essay, science fiction is more often a reflection of existing societal trends than a prediction of trends to come. The upsurge in drug use is precisely mirrored by the upsurge in the use of such themes in science fiction.

Science fiction is as much a guide to where we are as it is a vision of where we are going. A literature so popular with the young, commanding so intense and devoted a following, can be of significant value in revealing the patterns contemporary society is taking and will take in the years just ahead.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

PREFACE

v

OVERVIEW OF DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION

1

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

9

Primitive Period, c. 1900–1935

11

Predictive Period, c. 1935–1965

17

Contemporary Period, c. 1965–1973

31

AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX

53

OVERVIEW OF DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION

Defining science fiction is no easy task. Some of the definitions that have been proposed are so loose that they would qualify a book like Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith as science fiction—it surely is “fiction about science”—and others are drawn so narrowly that they would exclude much of what is published today in science-fiction magazines and books. With that caveat in mind, therefore, I offer one of the more flexible definitions, one which I think does cover the greater part of what I understand to be science fiction:

Science fiction is that branch of fantasy which engages in imaginative speculation about the impact of technology on human society.

By classing science fiction as a branch of fantasy, I make it a subdivision of that vast literary genre that includes Homer’s Odyssey, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Norse sagas, Alice in Wonderland, much of Poe, and so forth. Placing the emphasis on technology, however, requires science fiction to have a certain systematic content, an underlying rationale of theme. A story about a vampire is pure fantasy; a story that rationalizes vampirism in terms of metabolic phenomena is science fiction. It is the attempt at inducing a willing suspension of disbelief by supplying a plausible scaffolding for the implausible that gives science fiction its identity within the greater realm of fantasy.

But because science fiction is a form of fantasy, it is ideally suited for the exploration of drug-related phenomena. A drug is a kind of magic wand; but it is a chemist’s magic wand, a laboratory product, carrying with it the cachet of science. By offering his characters a vial of green pills or a flask of mysterious blue fluid the author is able to work wonders as easily as a sorcerer; and by rigorously examining the consequences of his act of magic, he performs the exploration of speculative ideas which is the essence of science fiction.

So in the nineteenth century Robert Louis Stevenson produced Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley devised an elixir of immortality in The Mortal Immortal, and H. G. Wells created a whole shelf of drug-related stories, speeding up human motion in “The New Accelerator,” turning beasts into men in The Island of Dr. Moreau, depicting an unseeable phantom in The Invisible Man. And in the present century the use of mind-altering or mind-controlling drugs has become one of the prime vehicles for the speculations of science-fictionists.

In preparing this study of drug themes in science fiction, I have employed the following categorical designations:

Drugs as Euphorics: Drugs that give pleasure in simple unstructured ways, through release from depression and tension, much as alcohol does in our society (though alcohol is not strictly speaking a euphoric, of course).

Drugs as Mind Expanders: Drugs that provide “psychedelic” visions of other times or places or that offer a sensation of oneness with the cosmos as a whole; analogous to LSD in our society.

Drugs as Panaceas: Drugs which, through tranquilizing or neutralizing effects, calm the mind without necessarily inducing euphoria.

Drugs as Mind Controllers: Drugs that enable one entity to limit or direct the activities or desires of another; analogous to brainwashing, and generally associated with totalitarian activities.

Drugs as Intelligence-Enhancers: Drugs which have the specific property of extending or amplifying the rational processes of the mind.

Drugs as Sensation-Enhancers: Drugs whose effects are achieved through amplified or extended bodily sensation-response, perhaps analogous to marijuana in our society.

Drugs as Reality-Testers: Drugs which permit the user to penetrate the “real” realities beyond the surface manifestations of daily life.

Drugs as Mind-Injurers: Drugs used as weapons in biochemical warfare, aimed at the mind.

Drugs as Means of Communication: Drugs that have the specific property of opening hitherto unknown channels of communication between minds.

Two distinct attitudes toward the use of mind-related drugs have manifested themselves in science fiction. One is cautionary: that any extraordinary indulgence in extraordinary drugs is likely to rot the moral fiber of the user, leading to lassitude and general decay of the individual or of society, and ultimately, perhaps, aiding the establishment of a totalitarian order. The other is visionary and utopian: that through the employment of drugs mankind can attain spiritual or psychological powers not ordinarily available, and by so doing can enter into a new and higher phase of existence.

This latter attitude has become far more widespread since 1965, when middle-class use of hallucinogenic and euphoric drugs in western industrial civilization first began to take on the aspect of a major cultural shift. The cultural assumptions of science fiction as a whole can clearly be seen to follow, rather than to lead, public opinion: most science fiction published in the twentieth century has been mass-market commercial fiction which, however daring its departures from everyday reality, has generally tended to adopt the conventional moral dogmas of middle-class society, as does most commercial fiction. Science fiction of the 1920’s and 1930’s reveals a remarkable degree of racism no longer acceptable to general readers in what they read (though they may cling to prejudices in daily life). Science fiction of the 1940’s and 1950’s is marked by casual sexism likewise no longer officially acceptable. And science fiction in general has shown a strong, if implicit, bias in favor of capitalism, the work ethic, Puritan sexual morality, and other pillars of western industrial society. Drug-users in science-fiction stories until quite recently were analogous to heavy users of alcohol in mainstream fiction: their reliance on a consciousness-altering substance was seen as a sign of weakness of character. In the past decade there has been a major cultural shift in our society toward hedonistic behavior, at first furtively, now openly; and this, after the customary lag, has been translated into a shift in the direction of permissiveness in the conventional moral attitudes expressed by popular entertainment. (The private behavior of individuals is almost always far more scandalous than the standards of behavior the public demands in entertainment or from elected officials, but as taboos dissolve in private life they weaken, to a lesser extent, in official public morality.)

Science-fiction writers tend to be no more radical as a group than any other randomly selected cross-section of middle-class educated contemporary citizenry, so far as my extensive personal acquaintance with them has shown; however forward-looking their fictional visions may be, they are, in the main, far from atypical in daily life style. Not only do they conform to prevailing cultural beliefs more than outsiders are likely to suspect, but, as is true of most who depend for their livelihoods on mass-audience acceptance, they quite readily espouse a surprising conservatism of philosophy in their work. In the past, therefore, professional science-fictionists almost automatically chose a cautionary position for stories embodying drug-related themes, the drugs being symbolic of decay rather than growth, and it is only in the last few years that some writers have felt free to depict the use of certain mind drugs in a positive—even evangelical—light.

The extent of the shift may best be illustrated from the work of a writer who, although he wrote science fiction, cannot be considered a professional science-fictionist nor an advocate of conventional morality, and whose career was conducted almost entirely outside the taboo-ridden assumptions of mass-market publishing: Aldous Huxley.

Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a bitter satiric novel that, as its sardonic title indicates, depicts a utopian world of the future in which children are born in bottles at a State Hatchery and Conditioning Center, designed by the benevolent world state to fit a particular economic niche, and, as adults, kept in line by a generous bread-and-circuses policy. Restlessness is cured by a wondrous drug called soma: “... if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions,” Huxley tells us, “there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labor and distraction....”[1] Those malcontents and nonconformists who cannot accept the soft mechanical pleasures of Huxley’s brave new world are exiled to remote islands.

[1] Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1946. p. 67.

Soma, in Brave New World, is implicitly condemned as an opiate, a mind-luller, an instrument of repression. Huxley’s negative outlook toward the drug is not, though, an expression of work-oriented Puritan morality so much as a classic liberal-humanitarian distrust of technology: the Huxley of 1932 plainly believed that mankind coddled by drugs was something less than what mankind could be. The young Huxley felt contempt for those who needed mechanical aids or who depended on anything other than the force of their own intellects. Many years later, however, a very different Huxley experienced the psychedelic marvels of mescaline and LSD, which kindled in him strong esthetic delight and something akin to spiritual ecstasy. When he next attempted the fictional construction of a utopian commonwealth, in Island (1962), his outlook on mind-altering drugs was far more sympathetic. In this ideal state of the future one uses not the soporific soma but the ecstasy-invoking moksha, a mind-expanding hallucinogen. Concerning moksha one character says, “Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names—the moksha-medicine, the reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved.”[2] Huxley is really talking about LSD, and his tone is that of the acid-evangelist.

[2] Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1962. p. 157.

Drug as contemptible anodyne, drug as gateway to higher reality—those are the poles bounding the handling of drugs in science fiction. The older science fiction was preponderantly negative, as, for example, James Gunn’s The Joy Makers, published in 1961 but written half a decade earlier, in which a repressive government sustains itself through mandatory use of euphorics. The same theme can be found in Hartley’s Facial Justice (1960), and in other works. Even when not used as an instrument of totalitarianism, drugs are often seen as dangerous self-indulgence, as in Wellman’s Dream-Dust from Mars (1938), Smith’s Hellflower (1953), or Pohl’s What to Do Until the Analyst Comes (1956). The prototypes for the imaginary drugs described in these stories are alcohol and heroin—drugs which blur the mind and lower the consciousness.

Much recent science fiction, however, taking cognizance of such newly popular drugs as LSD, marijuana, and mescaline, show society transformed, enhanced, and raised up by drug use. Silverberg’s A Time of Changes (1971) portrays a dour, self-hating culture into which comes a drug that stimulates direct telepathic contact between human minds and brings into being a subculture of love and openness. This creates a great convulsion in the society, but the implication is that the change the drug brings is beneficial. Similarly, in Panshin’s How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? (1971), a drug called tempus that induces travel in time is part of the educational process of a future society. In The Peacock King by McCombs and White (1965) LSD is used as a training device to prepare astronauts for the rigors of interstellar travel, and in H. H. Hollis’ Stoned Counsel (1972) hallucinogenic drugs have become routine aspects of courtroom work. Another view of a society transformed but not necessarily injured by mass drug use is Wyman Guin’s Beyond Bedlam, dating from 1951, in which schizophrenia is desired and encouraged and is induced by drugs. In Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth (1971) hallucinogens play a part in ecstatic religion on another world.

A variant of the mind-expanding drug is the intelligence-enhancing drug, long a common theme in science fiction. Some recent exponents of the theme are Brunner’s The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), Dickson’s The R-Master (1973), and Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968).

Not all depiction of drugs in recent science fiction is sympathetic, of course. Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head (1970) shows all of Europe thrown into confusion by the “acid-head war,” in which an Arab power doses the whole continent with psychedelic weapons. (Aldiss does indicate at least peripherally that the new tripped-out culture emerging in war-wrecked Europe is not entirely inferior to its predecessor.) Chester Anderson’s lighthearted The Butterfly Kid (1967) depicts hallucinogenic drugs as weapons employed by aliens, whether mind-expanding, mind-contracting, or mind-controlling. In the horrendously overpopulated future of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), LSD and marijuana are the best available escapes from the daily nightmare that is life; in a similarly crowded world imagined by Doris Pitkin Buck in Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming (1964) the drug of choice is nothing we have today, but rather one that gives the user the vicarious experience of existence as a dinosaur! However different the details, though, the stories say the same thing: that fortitude is not enough, that chemical assistance will be needed.

The stories in the sample chosen for this project illustrate the whole range of drug themes in science fiction, from the plausible to the fantastic, from the horrifying to the ecstasy-inducing. In a world where man and his technological marvels must coexist along an uneasy interface, science fiction indicates some of the possible impact areas in the decades and centuries ahead.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The science-fiction works selected for this bibliography are arranged chronologically within the categories described below.

Primitive Period circa 1900–1935. Science fiction was then, at least in the specialist magazines, a crude and artless form, and the stories tend to be skeletal and formula-ridden. Typically, a scientist working in secret (often a mad scientist) devises a drug whose effects operate on the mind in some extreme fashion, and through secret experiments demonstrates the perils of this drug. Examples: Barnes, Binder, Fearn, Gatter, Hall, etc.

Predictive Period circa 1935–1965. As the genre matured, authors began to seek greater complexity of style and structure in their fiction, and to achieve greater thematic perception. The stories of this period characteristically attempted to consider the most wide-ranging consequences of drug use; the authors themselves typically had had no experience with drugs other than alcohol, and based their ideas partly on imaginative projection and partly on the reports of such early experimenters with drugs as Baudelaire and deQuincy. Examples: Guin, Pohl, Collins, Huxley (1932), MacDonald, Hartley, Gunn.

Contemporary Period circa 1965 to date. With drug use now a matter for the news media as well as for solitary experimenters and literateurs, experience with mind-altering phenomena grows; many authors now sample marijuana and LSD and use their experiences as a basis for projections of trends. The changes in society are presumed to be permanent and become fixtures in stories, so that characters in a story set in 1999 use drugs like marijuana and LSD as casually as characters in a futuristic story written in 1950 would use cigarettes and alcohol. Drug use is taken for granted in the future, and new uses are postulated as an outgrowth of a richness of drug experience not available to earlier science-fiction writers, who had neither the personal experience nor the wealth of published data that present-day writers may draw upon. Examples: Aldiss, Spinrad, Silverberg, Dick, Anderson, Disch, Moorcock, Brunner.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMITIVE PERIOD

(1900–1935)

Author:

Pratt, Fletcher and Lester, Irvin

Title:

The Roger Bacon formula

Journal:

Amazing Stories, Vol. 3, No. 10, 940–948

Publisher:

Experimenter Publishing Company, New York

Date:

January 1929

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Medievalist rediscovers lost manuscript in which Roger Bacon provides the formula for mandragordeum, a drug that induces “transportation of the mind.” Taking it, the experimenter finds himself freed from his body and journeying to Venus; a vivid vision of life on the second planet ends only when the drug wears off. Fearing addiction, he never tries the drug again, though he admits a temptation to more tripping.

Author:

Harris, Clare Winger

Title:

The diabolical drug

Journal:

Amazing Stories, Vol. 4, No. 2, 156–161

Publisher:

Experimenter Publishing Company, New York

Date:

May 1929

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

Scientist develops a chemical which, by retarding the voltage of the brain’s electrical activity, halts the aging process. An experiment on a human is performed, the subject being the scientist’s beloved, who is six years older than he is; he intends to hold her at the same age until he has caught up. She sinks into a kind of stasis. Unable to perfect an antidote, he injects himself also, and the two of them enter a strange suspended animation in which extreme psychological effects of the metabolic slowdown manifest themselves.

Author:

Huxley, Aldous

Title:

Brave New World

Publisher:

Chatto & Windus, London, England

Pages:

214 pp.

Date:

1932

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as panaceas

Annotation:

In mechanized, standardized utopian world of the future, where human beings are synthetically produced in incubators and conditioned for optimum social stability, a drug called soma serves as the utopiate of the masses, distracting and tranquilizing those who might otherwise become restless in their too-comfortable lives.

Author:

Keller, David H.

Title:

The literary corkscrew

Journal:

Wonder Stories, Vol. 5, No. 8, 867–873

Publisher:

Continental Publications, New York

Date:

March 1934

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as intelligence enhancers

Annotation:

Satiric story. A professional writer discovers he can write only when in physical pain, and requires his wife to drive a corkscrew into his back to get him started. But the pain of the corkscrew is impossible to sustain for long, and they seek medical help. The doctor they consult discovers that it isn’t the pain itself but rather certain hormones secreted as a response to the pain that encourages literary production, and synthesizes a drug that makes writing easier. Doctor takes his own drug and writes a best-seller.

Author:

Fearn, John Russell

Title:

He never slept

Journal:

Astounding Stories, Vol. 13, No. 4, 56–67

Publisher:

Street & Smith, New York

Date:

June 1934

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as intelligence-enhancers

Annotation:

Scientist concocts a protein-based drug that frees the subject from all need to sleep. Narrator takes the drug and enters into a condition of enhanced perceptivity in which he is capable of penetrating the visionary recesses of his own mind and visiting the dream-creating processes. The experience eventually exhausts him, but unable to give up use of the drug, he looks forward to death as the only release from its effects.

Author:

Herbert, Benson

Title:

The control drug

Journal:

Wonder Stories, Vol. 6, No. 6, 669–675

Publisher:

Continental Publications, New York

Date:

November 1934

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

Scientist invents a xenon-derived drug that seems to offer a “paradise” effect—brief glimpses of the Divine, freedom from the material body, etc. But further research shows its dread long-term effects: “The stuff doesn’t exalt you or energize you.... What it does is to release the emotions from a lifetime of civilized control and suppression. It takes the bonds off secret desires. Its subtle physiological action leaves you with no control whatever.” Naturally he destroys the drug and takes his own life.

Author:

Hamilton, Edmond

Title:

The truth gas

Journal:

Wonder Stories, Vol. 6, No. 5, 1060–1071

Publisher:

Continental Publications, New York

Date:

February 1935

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

A scientist who believes that all sin and crime stem from deceptiveness perfects and releases into the atmosphere a drug that “causes a short-circuit between the brain’s thought-centers and its motor-centers of speech” so that lying becomes impossible. The resulting compulsive honesty leads to impossible social situations as the whole veneer of tact and diplomacy vanishes; it becomes necessary to devise and release an antidote.

Author:

Bartel, Philip J.

Title:

The elixir of progress

Journal:

Wonder Stories, Vol. 6, No. 11, 1286–1304

Publisher:

Continental Publications, New York

Date:

April 1935

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

Satiric story of the quest in the year 3903 for rediscovery of the lost ancient drug that provided stimulation and energy and delight to early man—coffee.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREDICTIVE PERIOD

(1935–1965)

Author:

Smith, Clark Ashton

Title:

The Plutonian drug

Journal:

Amazing Stories, Vol. 9, No. 5, 41–48

Publisher:

Teck Publications, New York

Date:

September 1934

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Among the many drugs brought back to Earth by space explorers is Plutonium, a powder from Pluto that produces a hashish-like derangement of time-perception, permitting the user to transform time into space and go on psychedelic voyages. The subject penetrates five or six hours into the past, an ineffable experience that ends with a vision of his own death soon fulfilled in reality.

Author:

Barnes, Arthur K.

Title:

Emotion solution

Journal:

Wonder Stories, Vol. 7, No. 8, 955–963

Publisher:

Continental Publications, New York

Date:

April 1936

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

A scientist who feels that emotions are a hindrance to the full development of intelligence perfects a solution that destroys the “emotional centers” of the brain; he infiltrates it into the Southern California water system. The resulting emotionless society is lifeless and without energy, not at all what the scientist envisioned, and he feels guilt for having transformed millions of people into dull robots.

Author:

Gatter, George F.

Title:

Emotion gas

Journal:

Wonder Stories, Vol. 7, No. 8, 967–971

Publisher:

Continental Publications, New York

Date:

April 1936

Format:

Short story

Descriptors:

Drugs as mind-controllers; Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

Unscrupulous theatrical producers enhance the box-office appeal of their comedy by surreptitiously dosing the audience with a gas that induces euphoria; they leave convinced they have seen an extraordinarily funny show, and business booms, until one night an overdose is given that amplifies not only happy feelings but passing moments of depression, causing everybody to leave in a black despondent mood that kills the show.

Author:

Coblentz, Stanton A.

Title:

The glowworm flower

Journal:

Astounding Stories, Vol. 17, No. 4, 22–29

Publisher:

Street & Smith Publications, New York

Date:

June 1936

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

A pioneering space exploration voyage brings back, by accident, spores of an extraterrestrial plant that sprouts on Earth. The flower of this plant gives off a fragrance that induces intoxication, coma, and opium-like visions. Tripping on glowworm-flower fragrance becomes addictive for many of Earth’s finest minds, though lesser folk are relatively immune. The plant is eradicated everywhere, possession of it is made illegal, and all space missions are banned lest spaceships again be contaminated with the sinister spores.

Author:

Binder, Eando

Title:

The hormone menace

Journal:

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Vol. 8, No. 1, 34–47

Publisher:

Beacon Magazines, Inc., New York

Date:

August 1936

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

Villainous scientist, using extracts derived from endocrine secretions, transforms human beings into mindless puppets of abnormal strength and stature or of extraordinary mental abilities (i.e., photographic memories). Heroic underground agent penetrates his remote laboratory and puts an end to the research.

Author:

Wellman, Manly Wade

Title:

Dream-dust from Mars

Journal:

Thrilling Wonder Stories, Vol. 11, No. 1, 14–28

Publisher:

Better Publications, Inc., New York

Date:

February 1938

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as panaceas

Annotation:

The spores of a Martian lichen are an agreeable stimulant to Martians of the 28th century but throw Earthmen into deep trances in which they experience prolonged ecstatic dreams. The dream-dust becomes immensely popular on Earth and is outlawed when everyone seems headed for the oblivion it provides.

Author:

Hall, Charles F.

Title:

The time drug

Journal:

Tales of Wonder, Vol. 1, No. 5, 62–73

Publisher:

The World’s Work, Surrey, England

Date:

Winter 1938

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Scientist perfects a drug, mixing together cactus alkaloids and kava root, which creates powerful psychedelic effects and allows the experimenter to float backward in time. Backward explorations continue until the researcher reaches the creation of the universe, with grave consequences for him.

Author:

Kyle, David A.

Title:

Golden nemesis

Journal:

Stirring Science Stories, Vol. 1, No. 1, 28–34

Publisher:

Albing Publications, New York

Date:

February 1941

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Aware that most of the capacity of the human brain remains unused, an experimenter devises a drug that will raise him to superhuman intelligence by giving him access to his entire brain. He is transformed into a genius by the drug, but only for a brief, intense “trip,” which after a few days so exhausts him that, “nerves on fire,” he dies of heart failure. The story is a remarkable anticipation of extreme LSD effects.

Author:

Pohl, Frederik

Title:

What to do until the analyst comes

In:

Alternating Currents

Publisher:

Ballantine Books, New York

Pages:

143–154

Date:

1956

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as panaceas

Annotation:

Narrator is an advertising man who tells how, after a cigarettes-and-lung-cancer scare, researchers discover a cheap, allegedly harmless and non-addictive euphoric drug, and it goes on the market in chewing-gum form as a replacement for cigarettes. Soon everyone is chewing Cheery-Gum except the narrator, who is allergic to it; and though the drug is theoretically non-addictive, it makes everyone so high that no one wants to give it up—leading to a dazed and tranquilized society in which everyone is euphoric and indolent and everyone maintains that he could kick the Cheery-Gum habit on a moment’s notice, if he had any reason to do so—which he doesn’t.

Author:

Slesar, Henry

Title:

I remember oblivion

Journal:

Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 3, 36–43

Publisher:

Mercury Press, New York

Date:

March 1966

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

A technique has been devised for literal brainwashing of criminals, i.e., the total eradication through chemotherapy of memory, and the reconstruction, using drugs and “narco-hypnosis,” of a new non-criminal personality within the existing body. The narrative cuts from the conversation of two scientists using the technique to the stream-of-consciousness of a rehabilitated criminal who, breaking through his conditioning, regains access to his memories and commits suicide in his guilt.

Author:

Keller, David H.

Title:

The abyss

In:

The Solitary Hunters and the Abyss

Publisher:

New Era Publishers, Philadelphia

Pages:

108–265

Date:

1948

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

A scientist isolates XYZ, a chemical present in the minds of psychotics, and, purely as an experiment, doses all of New York City with it by distributing it in the form of chewing gum. Mass psychosis results; civilization collapses and the eight million guinea pigs revert to a sort of Roman culture, with barbaric gladiatorial games, an emperor, mass brutality, new religions. After thirty days the drug wears off and the victims fall into coma and awaken unharmed.

Author:

MacDonald, John D.

Title:

Trojan horse laugh

Journal:

Astounding Science Fiction, Vol. 43, No. 6, 73–111

Publisher:

Street & Smith Publications, New York

Date:

August 1949

Format:

Short novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind controllers

Annotation:

An endocrinologist has charted a monthly human cycle of emotional peaks and depressions, and, for the sake of greater efficiency and harmony in society, has developed a drug that will control and adjust the cycle so that everyone treated will peak or drop at the same time. This works well during the high part of the cycle, but once the lows set in, mass hysteria develops among the inoculated populace, there is a wave of suicides, and a chain reaction of interlocking depressions virtually destroys society.

Author:

Williams, Robert Moore

Title:

The elixir of peace

Journal:

Amazing Stories, Vol. 23, No. 12, 124–131

Publisher:

Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, Chicago

Date:

December 1949

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

Comic story of a tranquilizing drug devised to make animals such as lions tame enough to use in movies. The demonstration leads to complications, and a furious movie director is “tamed” as well by surreptitious use of the drug.

Author:

Heinlein, Robert A.

Title:

The Puppet Masters

Publisher:

Doubleday & Co., New York

Pages:

219 pp.

Date:

1951

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

The Earth has been invaded by slug-like parasitic beings that attach themselves to men’s backs and dominate their minds and bodies. The protagonists, Sam Nivin and Mary, are members of a secret security agency fighting the invaders. In the middle of the struggle they decide to get married; but because they can only spare 24 hours for their honeymoon, they inject themselves with tempus, a drug analogous to speed, which stretches subjective time for them so that they feel they are experiencing a month-long honeymoon.

Author:

Morrison, William (Pseud. for Joseph Samachson)

Title:

The addicts

Journal:

Galaxy Science Fiction, Vol. 3, No. 4, 122–131

Publisher:

Galaxy Publishing Corporation, New York

Date:

January 1952

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

Husband and wife are lighthouse-keepers on a lonely asteroid between Earth and Mars. Husband has become addicted to marak, a euphoric drug that keeps him in a constant state of good nature and well-being. This makes meaningful conversation between him and wife impossible, since he is so agreeable that all discussions trail off immediately, and she is growing irritable for lack of stimulating company. Husband therefore decides secretly to give his wife addictive dose of drug.

Author:

Smith, George O.

Title:

Hellflower

Publisher:

Abelard Press, New York

Pages:

264 pp.

Date:

1953

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as sensation-enhancers

Annotation:

On Ganymede, moon of Jupiter, grows the gardenia-like plant from which hellflower, also known as love lotus, is extracted—a narcotic which heightens sensations and other sensory stimuli and creates psychological addiction through enhancement of pleasure—with women the chief victims. Story concerns the traffic in this and related drugs and the attempts of a government agent of the future to intercept it.

Author:

Devaux, Pierre and Viot, H. G.

Title:

The stolen minute

Journal:

Science Fiction Plus, Vol. 1, Nos. 4 and 5, 44–61, 42–62

Publisher:

Gernsback Publications, Inc., New York

Date:

June and August 1953

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

A French molecular physicist develops a drug known as hexostyromolybdenum, HSM, which has the property of vastly increasing the human metabolism. Motion, body speed, the rate of living, and other functions are accelerated 100,000 times. Protagonists make use of HSM to achieve desired political goals.

Author:

Phillips, Rog (Pseud. for Roger Philip Graham)

Title:

The yellow pill

Journal:

Astounding Science Fiction, Vol. 62, No. 2, 51–61

Publisher:

Street & Smith Publications, New York

Date:

October 1958

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as reality-testers

Annotation:

Psychiatrist encounters a patient who has committed murder and who has the delusion that he was on board a spaceship, defending himself against lizard-men from Venus, at the time of the killing. Patient totally denies the reality of actual world, and tells psychiatrist to take a yellow pill that will awaken him to the true reality of the spaceship-world. Psychiatrist is amused by concept of a yellow pill that can bring one out of a delusion; but then he finds a bottle of yellow pills in his locker and the story becomes an exploration of ambiguous levels of reality, with the pills serving as conduits between one “real” world and the other.

Author:

Hartley, L. P.

Title:

Facial Justice

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

263 pp.

Date:

1960

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

The scene is the not very distant future, after the Third World War. Nine tenths of the human race has been destroyed and the survivors are ruled by a benevolent dictator who reduces conflict situations by imposing an enforced equality: personalities are standardized, numbers are used for names, women undergo plastic surgery so that none will seem too beautiful or too ugly. This dreary homogenized state is kept under control by dosing the citizens daily with a sedative-like bromide to which most people have become addicted; it lowers vitality and reduces nonconformity.

Author:

Gunn, James

Title:

The Joy Makers

Publisher:

Bantam Books, New York

Pages:

160 pp.

Date:

1961

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

Under the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 2003, hedonism is the law of the land. The function of government, it has been decided, is “the preservation and promotion of the temporary happiness of its citizens.” Gloom is outlawed and happiness is mandatory. It is attained through mental disciplines, through mechanical regulation of the metabolism, and through the free use of drugs—notably mescaline, “neo-heroin,” various alkaloids, and certain futuristic euphorics.

Author:

Huxley, Aldous

Title:

Island

Publisher:

Harper & Row, New York

Pages:

295 pp.

Date:

1962

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

This Utopian novel, written thirty years after Huxley’s anti-drug Brave New World and after his own experiments with LSD and mescaline, depicts another ideal commonwealth centering on the use of drugs: but in place of Brave New World’s mind-deadening soma, the citizens of Island use moksha, a hallucinogen very similar in effect to LSD, which induces mystical visions and intensifies religious experience.

Author:

Burgess, Anthony

Title:

A Clockwork Orange

Publisher:

W. W. Norton, New York

Pages:

160 pp.

Date:

1963

Format:

Novel

Descriptors:

Drugs as mind-controllers; Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Alex is a juvenile delinquent of the near future, who routinely uses such drugs as synthemesc or drencrom that are sold in neighborhood “milk bars” for hallucinogenic boosts. After committing a particularly atrocious assault, Alex is arrested and sentenced to a kind of brainwash reconditioning. With the aid of drugs and hypnotherapy he is conditioned against violence and turned loose to become a useful citizen.

Author:

Buck, Doris Pitkin

Title:

Come where my love lies dreaming

Journal:

Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2, 113–126

Publisher:

Mercury Press, New York

Date:

February 1964

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as panaceas

Annotation:

The quickest refuge from the horrors of life in 21st century Washington, D. C., is the use of detenser pills. The latest brand is Protoceratops Tabs, which mentally transport the user to the Mesozoic Era and create the illusion that he or she is a dinosaur. The story, gently comic in tone, follows the adventures of a woman who takes the dinosaur trip and comes face-to-face not only with prehistoric beasts but with her own inner problems.

Author:

Purdom, Tom

Title:

Greenplace

Journal:

Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 5, 5–16

Publisher:

Mercury Press, New York

Date:

November 1964

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as intelligence enhancers

Annotation:

Protagonist is a psychologist doing political field-testing on behalf of a Congressman running for re-election c. 1980. As he prepares to enter a suburban district controlled by his candidate’s powerful opponent, he doses himself with MST, a newly invented psychic energizer that “multiplied the powers of observation and the rate and quality of thought by a factor somewhere between three and seven.” Under the influence of MST he is able to detect the frightening psychological techniques by which the suburb is held in control.

Author:

McCombs, Larry and White, Ted

Title:

The peacock king

Journal:

Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 5, 23–36

Publisher:

Mercury Press, New York

Date:

November 1965

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

The United States is planning its first expedition into interstellar space, using a radical space-drive that permits faster-than-light travel. Preliminary experiments have shown that a faster-than-light trip will have grave psychological impact on the crew, and therefore LSD is used as part of the training discipline for the crew (a man and a woman). Through acid experiences they make themselves capable of handling the interstellar jump through hyperspace.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONTEMPORARY PERIOD

(1965–Present)

Author:

Guin, Wyman

Title:

Beyond bedlam

In:

Living Way Out

Publisher:

Avon Books, New York

Pages:

155–208

Date:

1967 (1951 First Issue)

Format:

Short novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as panaceas

Annotation:

During the late 20th century drugs were developed to aid schizophrenics by permitting their warring inner personalities to live side by side, controlling the body alternately. By the following century the element of schizophrenia is recognized in all persons and it becomes mandatory to use the drugs, giving everyone a prime ego and an alternate ego, in fact separate persons, who undergo drug-induced shifts of dominance every five days. The author explores the concept of ego-shift by following the fortunes of a number of protagonists whose doubled personalities engage in complex interactions.

Author:

Collins, Hunt (Pseud. of Evan Hunter)

Title:

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Publisher:

Pyramid Books, New York

Pages:

190 pp.

Date:

1956

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as reality-testers

Annotation:

The novel, set in a near-future Earth dominated by advertising and television, describes the conflict between two groups of differing social philosophies: the Vikes, who advocate vicarious pleasure and indulge in heroin-like narcotics to escape from reality, and the Rees, or Realists, an austere Puritan movement hostile to all mind-altering substances.

Author:

Dick, Philip K.

Title:

We can remember it for you wholesale

Journal:

Fantasy and Science Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 4, 3–16

Publisher:

Mercury Press, Inc., New York

Date:

April 1966

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

A technique is developed by which, using a hypnotic drug called narkidrine, false memories can be implanted in a human brain. The memory-implant technique can be used to provide the vicarious illusion of pleasurable experience, but also—as the story unfolds—we see that it can be used for purposes of political intrigue.

Author:

Dick, Philip K.

Title:

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

278 pp.

Date:

1965

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

An illegal hallucinogen, Can-D, allows Earth colonists on Mars, Venus, and other nearby worlds to stave off the crushing boredom of daily life by permitting them to enter a highly schematicized common fantasy world where they share in the adventures of two imaginary lovers who are larger-than-life Hollywood dream-figures. Complications ensue when a competitive reality-destroying drug, Chew-Z, is introduced surreptitiously by beings from another solar system.

Author:

Dick, Philip K.

Title:

Now Wait for Last Year

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

214 pp.

Date:

1966

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

In the war-torn world of the 21st century, Americans escape from the horrors of their time by addictive use of JJ-180, a drug that allows the consciousness to detach from present time and return to earlier eras, or even to travel forward in time. The protagonist, initially attempting only to deal with his wife’s addiction to the time-travel drug, eventually becomes entangled in global politics and the progress of the interstellar war as he himself, under the influence of JJ-180, oscillates backward and forward in time.

Author:

Harrison, Harry

Title:

Make Room! Make Room!

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

213 pp.

Date:

1966

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

The year is 1999 and the population of New York City is 35 million. In this hideously overcrowded society marijuana and LSD are the chief means of escape from stress, and their use is far more pervasive than it is today. Filmed as Soylent Green.

Author:

Aldiss, Brian W.

Title:

The night that all time broke loose

In:

Dangerous Visions (Edited by Harlan Ellison)

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

151–160

Date:

1967

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Comic story about time gas, piped through mains to suburban houses the way heating gas is distributed. Using time gas, subscribers can dial themselves back to any period in their lives they prefer to re-experience. Story concerns a break in the gas main that floods the region with time gas and touches off a great gusher that carries mankind back into prehistoric times, with dinosaurs imminent as the time-effects grow more powerful.

Author:

Anderson, Chester

Title:

The Butterfly Kid

Publisher:

Pyramid Books, New York

Pages:

190 pp.

Date:

1967

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

In this comic novel, set among the drug-using counter-culturists of Greenwich Village, trouble starts when Reality Pills become available—a “projective hallucinogen” that creates hallucinations visible not only to the user but to those around him. It develops that Reality Pills have been invented and distributed by blue lobster-like beings from another planet in order to facilitate their conquest of Earth—a conquest ultimately thwarted by the dedication of a fearless band of hippies.

Author:

Dick, Philip K. and Nelson, Ray

Title:

The Ganymede Takeover

Publisher:

Ace Books, New York

Pages:

157 pp.

Date:

1967

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

In this satiric novel intelligent worm-like beings from Ganymede, moon of Jupiter, conquer the Earth despite the best efforts of such individuals as Rudolph Balkani, Chief of the Bureau of Psychedelic Research, who has been working on a mind-blocking weapon. The world that Ganymede conquered is in fact devoted on all levels to the use of psychedelics, and the novel raises questions about the nature of “reality” as the action unfolds.

Author:

Lupoff, Richard A.

Title:

One Million Centuries

Publisher:

Lancer Books, New York

Pages:

352 pp.

Date:

1967

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

A man of the twentieth century is thrust forward in time to the world of the unimaginably distant future. As he explores the civilization he finds himself among, he learns that the people of the era habitually chew samra, a hallucinogenic drug, and a woman he meets takes him on a samra trip. It is a soaring visionary experience in which he perceives the birth and death of the solar system.

Author:

Spinrad, Norman

Title:

Carcinoma angels

In:

Dangerous Visions (Edited by Harlan Ellison)

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

489–497

Date:

1967

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Protagonist suffering from terminal cancer seeks remission of disease. With the aid of massive doses of various hallucinogenic agents he reaches an ostensible mental state in which he is capable of entering his own body to do psychic battle with the cancer cells. In series of metaphorical contests he destroys the invaders, but is unable to return to real-world consciousness and is remanded to mental institution, trapped within his own body.

Author:

Wilson, Colin

Title:

The Mind Parasites

Publisher:

Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin

Pages:

222 pp.

Date:

1967

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

A research project involving heavy doses of mescaline and LSD leads to perceptions revealing the existence of invisible “mind parasites,” alien invaders who have long controlled and influenced human life. With the aid of the drug, experimenters unleash mental powers with which to combat the invaders.

Author:

Disch, Thomas

Title:

Camp Concentration

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

184 pp.

Date:

1968

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as intelligence-enhancers

Annotation:

The novel is the journal of a U.S. political prisoner of the near future who is assigned to observe and record the progress of an experiment in which volunteer prisoners at a secret internment camp are treated with Pallidine, an intelligence-enhancing drug derived from the organism that causes syphilis. In the course of nine months the drug turns the prisoners into supermen of extraordinary mental capacity while destroying their bodies with disease.

Author:

Herbert, Frank

Title:

The Santaroga Barrier

Publisher:

Berkley Books, New York

Pages:

255 pp.

Date:

1968

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

An outsider penetrates a remote California valley inhabited by reclusive farmers who discourage all contact with strangers. He discovers that they have built a society based on consumption of Jaspers—a psychedelic drug going far beyond acid in its effects, fostering a sense of community through its ability to allow takers to perceive the ultimate relationships linking all aspects of the universe. He is drawn into the valley society and becomes part of it.

Author:

Moorcock, Michael

Title:

The Final Programme

Publisher:

Avon Books, New York

Pages:

191 pp.

Date:

1968

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Satiric comic novel of near future, in which hallucinogenic drugs are used in a variety of ways—as, for example, LSD gas, employed as a protective device and discharged to muddle the minds of burglars breaking into a mansion. More conventional use of drugs (i.e., as euphorics and hallucinogens) is common in the book.

Author:

Silverberg, Robert

Title:

How it was when the past went away

In:

Earth’s Other Shadow (By Robert Silverberg)

Publisher:

New American Library, New York

Pages:

66–127

Date:

1973 (First Issue 1969)

Format:

Short novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-injurers

Annotation:

One day in 2003 an unknown malcontent dumps an amnesia-producing drug into the water system of San Francisco. Within a few hours virtually everyone in the city has lost his memory, and the effects of the memory drug linger for several days, causing great complications. Story follows the reactions of several characters to the varied effects of sudden amnesia. As story ends things are returning to normal for most people, but one unstable individual has obtained a supply of the drug and is preaching its use in a new cult of oblivion.

Author:

Spinrad, Norman

Title:

Bug Jack Barron

Publisher:

Walker Books, New York

Pages:

327 pp.

Date:

1969

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

In the closing years of the 20th century the work of a foundation for life-extension research becomes the center of fierce political controversy. The tensions growing out of the search for immortality are depicted against the background of a near-future world in which marijuana and the psychedelic drugs are legal and widely consumed.

Author:

Aldiss, Brian W.

Title:

Barefoot in the Head

Publisher:

Doubleday & Company, New York

Pages:

281 pp.

Date:

1970

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-injurers

Annotation:

In Europe of the near future, political tensions have led to the bombing of the entire continent by the Arab state of Kuwait with psychedelic weapons—odorless, tasteless, and enormously potent. In the aftermath of the war all of Europe finds itself on a perpetual LSD trip, since the drug’s aftereffects prove ineradicable. Industrial society breaks down, reason becomes extinct, and the novel itself dissolves into a Joycean verbal phantasmagoria as the old society gives way to one in which insanity is the norm.

Author:

Silverberg, Robert

Title:

Sundance

In:

The Cube Root of Uncertainty (By Robert Silverberg)

Publisher:

Collier Books, New York

Pages:

219–239

Date:

1970

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Protagonist is part of a team of Earth men annihilating a semi-intelligent alien race on an extrasolar world prior to colonization of the planet. Protagonist is emotionally disturbed—his American Indian ancestry makes him bitter about the genocide he feels is taking place—and his sympathies toward the aliens lead him to take part in their rites and to consume a hallucinogenic plant, used by them, that induces synesthesia and a sense of racial communion.

Author:

Vonnegut, Kurt

Title:

Welcome to the monkey house

In:

Welcome to the Monkey House (By Kurt Vonnegut)

Publisher:

Delacorte Press, New York

Pages:

28–47

Date:

1970

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

At a time when the world’s population is 17 billion, compulsory ethical birth control comes into effect. On pain of fine, everyone must take birth control pills three times a day. The pills do not interfere with reproduction, but, by making people numb from the waist down, “take every bit of pleasure out of sex.”

Author:

Benford, James

Title:

Pulse

Journal:

Fantastic Science Fiction, Vol. 20, No. 6, 22–25

Publisher:

Ultimate Publishing Company, New York

Date:

August 1971

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Young woman describes her LSD trip to her psychotherapist: a vision of another world (she thinks it is the moon) marked by strange geological formations and flora. He listens patiently to her descriptions of this obviously illusory experience, but she maintains the drug actually transported her, and as she goes on talking he is drawn into the illusion and finds himself mysteriously transported (without the aid of the drug) to the world of her narrative.

Author:

Lafferty, R. A.

Title:

Sky

In:

New Dimensions One, (Edited by Robert Silverberg)

Publisher:

Doubleday and Co., New York

Pages:

149–161

Date:

1971

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Protagonists in future civilization make use of Sky, a drug derived from an amanita mushroom. Stated powers of this drug are to provide sensations of mastery and union-with-cosmos, especially during parachute drops. Protagonists attain successively more ecstatic states in series of Sky-enhanced parachute drops, until, seeking the perfect high, they deliberately fail to use their parachutes on one Sky trip and, after a descent marked by moments of stunning ecstasy, perish as they hit the ground.

Author:

Panshin, Alexei

Title:

How can we sink when we can fly?

In:

Four Futures, a science-fiction anthology

Publisher:

Hawthorn Books, New York

Pages:

94–130

Date:

1971

Format:

Short novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

At some period in the future a drug called tempus is developed which enables people to travel backward in time, literally or perhaps in mind alone. Young people are required to take tempus journeys as part of the educational process. Story takes place in contemporary United States, c. 1970, and analyzes current problems by confronting the protagonist with a tempus-using visitor from the future.

Author:

Sheckley, Robert

Title:

Down the digestive tract

In:

Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (By Robert Silverberg)

Publisher:

Doubleday and Co., New York

Pages:

145–147

Date:

1971

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as reality-testers

Annotation:

An underground chemist gives a friend a mixture of hallucinogenic drugs guaranteed to send him into a true trip. Friend waits impatiently for the hallucinations to hit. Chemist and friend are actually not human but alien insecto-reptilian creatures, and it turns out that the hallucination the friend has is that of being a human being in our contemporary world.

Author:

Silverberg, Robert

Title:

Downward to the Earth

Publisher:

New American Library, New York

Pages:

176 pp.

Date:

1971

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

The venom of a serpent found on an alien planet that has been colonized by Earthmen proves to have medicinal value, serving as a catalyst in limb-regeneration work; but when used in a different dosage it has psychological effects, evoking in Earthmen the illusion that they have been transformed into the elephant-like intelligent species that is the dominant native life-form of the planet. Illicit use of the drug for this purpose is common among the Earthmen stationed there. Protagonist, expiating old guilts, goes among the elephant-beings and eventually is admitted into ecstatic communion with them through use of the drug.

Author:

Silverberg, Robert

Title:

A Time of Changes

Publisher:

New American Library, New York

Pages:

220 pp.

Date:

1971

Format:

Novel

Descriptors:

Drugs as mind-expanders, drugs as a means of communication

Annotation:

Scene is a planet of the future dominated by stern culture that makes a fetish of privacy and personal reticence. Narrator obtains from a “primitive” culture on another continent a drug which attacks the basics of his native culture by making possible direct telepathic contact between minds. He attempts to found a subculture of love and openness based on use of the drug, but, although he is a prince of the realm, he is proscribed and hunted down.

Author:

Silverberg, Robert

Title:

The World Inside

Publisher:

Doubleday and Co., New York

Pages:

201 pp.

Date:

1971

Format:

Novel

Descriptors:

Drugs as mind-expanders, drugs as a means of communication

Annotation:

In world of 24th century, most of mankind lives in thousand-story apartment buildings each of which has a population of more than 800,000. Chapter three of the novel follows the adventures of a musician who, after performing at a concert, drugs himself with a multiplexer, a mind-expanding drug that temporarily induces a telepathic contact simultaneously with all 800,000 residents of his building, so that he perceives their lives and thoughts in one vast intricate construct.

Author:

Davis, Grania

Title:

My head’s in a different place now

In:

Universe Two, (Edited by Terry Carr)

Publisher:

Ace Books, New York

Pages:

151–172

Date:

1972

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Young American married couple, weary of life on welfare in a large city, travel into Central American jungle in search of a drug-using primitive tribe of which they have heard. Eventually they find an Eden-like place where the natives, though dominated by fears of supernatural beings, seem whole and happy. The Americans discover hallucinogenic mushrooms near the village, begin using them, and settle into an amiable life of tripping and telepathic contact with animals, insects, and plants. As story ends they are planning to turn on the unsuspecting villagers.

Author:

Hollis, H. H.

Title:

Stoned counsel

In:

Again, Dangerous Visions, (Edited by Harlan Ellison)

Publisher:

Doubleday and Co., New York

Pages:

270–281

Date:

1972

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

In world of near future hallucinogenic drugs have become a routine part of the legal process. Lawyers examine evidence that is fed to them in direct association with LSD and other drugs, and trials are conducted with prosecutors and defense attorneys both in a drug-enhanced mental state. Approach of the story is sympathetic and detached; drug-enhancement is depicted as a new phase, not necessarily negative in implication, in courtroom procedure.

Author:

Jones, Langdon

Title:

The eye of the lens

In:

The Eye of the Lens (By Langdon Jones)

Publisher:

Collier Books, New York

Date:

1972

Pages:

53–90

Format:

Short novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Avant-garde story without summarizable plot: it attempts to depict various cinematic and psychedelic modes of perception and includes (p. 84) an explicitly psychedelic scene within a British cathedral of the near future where hallucinatory religious rituals take place.

Author:

Nelson, Ray

Title:

Time travel for pedestrians

In:

Again, Dangerous Visions, (Edited by Harlan Ellison)

Publisher:

Doubleday and Co., New York

Date:

1972

Pages:

140–159

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Protagonist, using crushed “flower seeds” plus auto-hypnotic techniques, embarks on a trip in which his consciousness perceives past existences. He travels mentally to medieval northern Europe, to Egypt shortly after the time of Jesus, to medieval southern France, and other eras.

Author:

Niven, Larry

Title:

The fourth profession

In:

Best Science Fiction of the Year, Vol. I, (Edited by Terry Carr)

Publisher:

Ballantine Books, New York

Pages:

293–340

Date:

1972

Format:

Short novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Alien beings known as Monks come to Earth and, to serve purposes of their own, distribute a variety of strange pills. One of these drugs is an intelligence-enhancer, another is a memory-destroyer, another induces instantaneous transport from one place to another. Story explores the effects of these and other alien-given drugs and the motivations of the aliens who distribute them.

Author:

Silverberg, Robert

Title:

Dying Inside

Publisher:

Charles Scribner’s and Sons, New York

Pages:

245 pp.

Date:

1972

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as means of communication

Annotation:

Story takes place in 1976. Narrator is middle-aged New York intellectual who has had the power of telepathy since childhood and now is losing it. The power has embittered him by rendering him a freak, and he has taken pains to conceal knowledge of it from others. He tells how, in 1968, a close love relationship of his was terminated when he and his woman friend took LSD together; the trip had the unexpected effect of opening a two-way telepathic channel between them, so that not only could he read her mind as usual but she briefly had access to his, giving her a bad trip and causing her to recoil from him.

Author:

Spinrad, Norman

Title:

No direction home

In:

Best Science Fiction of the Year, Vol. I, (Edited by Terry Carr)

Publisher:

Ballantine Books, New York

Pages:

227–244

Date:

1972

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Scene is United States of the near future in which psychedelic drugs of all kinds, including many not yet known, are legal and widely used on all levels of society. Story speculates in detail on the nature of a commercialized legal psychedelics industry and on the forms future drugs may take.

Author:

Bradley, Marion Zimmer

Title:

Darkover Landfall

Publisher:

Daw Books, New York

Pages:

160 pp.

Date:

1973

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Story describes the arrival on the extrasolar planet of Darkover of a shipload of colonists from Earth, and explores the impact on the Earthmen of the Ghost Wind, a native meteorological phenomenon that has psychedelic effects, caused by pollen, dust, or virus, which liberate ESP powers in their minds. The settlers, bombarded by hitherto unfamiliar sensory data, are plunged into conflict that transforms the group.

Author:

Brunner, John

Title:

The Stone That Never Came Down

Publisher:

Doubleday and Co., New York

Pages:

206 pp.

Date:

1973

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Scene is London, 1980’s: a time of chaos with World War III imminent. Chemists discover drug called VC—viral coefficient—which has the property of greatly intensifying sensory perception and amplifying intelligence and memory. Drug has ability to multiply in proper environment like living organism. When an unemployed teacher who has had an experimental dose of VC donates blood to central bloodbank, he unwittingly spreads VC widely to the world at large, causing an epidemic of sanity in which world leaders, now greatly more intelligent, take steps to abolish warfare and establish an ideally rational society.

Author:

Dickson, Gordon R.

Title:

The R-Master

Publisher:

Lippincott, Philadelphia

Pages:

216 pp.

Date:

1973

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

In the middle of the 21st century an intelligence-enhancing drug called Reninase-47 has come into wide use. Though normally it simply stimulates the thought process, R-47 occasionally does massive damage to the mind, and in a few cases creates a supergenius, an R-master. Protagonist’s brother takes R-47 and suffers brain damage. In order to help him, protagonist also takes the drug and unexpectedly emerges from treatment as an R-master, a member of an extraordinary elite group, and from another R-master he learns of the need for a vast reorganization of governmental policies. He becomes a revolutionary leader and works toward a transformation of society.

Author:

Free, Colin

Title:

The Soft Kill

Publisher:

Berkley Books, New York

Pages:

159 pp.

Date:

1973

Format:

Novel

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-controllers

Annotation:

Protagonist is a scientist stationed aboard an orbiting research station of the far future. Needing a holiday, he is transferred to a place called HighTown—an overpopulated city where a totalitarian government maintains control by dosing the citizens with a variety of tranquilizing and euphoric drugs. Novel explores the effect of government-by-chemistry.

Author:

Pumilia, Joseph F.

Title:

As dreams are made on

Journal:

Fantastic Science Fiction, Vol. 22, No. 3, 18–29

Publisher:

Ultimate Publishing Co., New York

Date:

1973

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

Teenage boy obtains a supply of metamorphium, a drug that induces fantasy-gratification dreams. Not only are his dreams richly satisfying, but he discovers that his girlfriend, whom he sees in the dreams, is aware of the visions as if the drug has induced some telepathic link between them. He has a vision of a time when everyone is linked through shared metamorphium dreams—“one big dream, one big mind asleep and dreaming all the time,” even though individual dreamers will wake from the big dream.

Author:

Rotsler, William

Title:

Gods of Zar

Journal:

Amazing Stories, Vol. 47, No. 3, 20–40

Publisher:

Ultimate Publishing Co., New York

Date:

1973

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

An Earthman stranded on an alien planet becomes god of the local native race. When his people are attacked by a hostile tribe he defeats the enemy soldiers by dosing them with tazeel, a euphoric drug of the planet that destroys their discipline and converts them instantly from Spartan ferocity to self-indulgence.

Author:

Scortia, Thomas N.

Title:

The weariest river

In:

Future City, (Edited by Roger Elwood)

Publisher:

Trident Press, New York

Pages:

108–148

Date:

1973

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as euphorics

Annotation:

The scene is about 350 years from now. An immortality treatment has been perfected and the world has become a savagely overcrowded, polluted urban sprawl in which people live forever. Drugs are the main refuge from boredom among the immortals. The protagonist is the inventor of the immortality serum, whose life is spent in an endless search for illegal drugs to palliate his guilt and spiritual malaise.

Author:

Spinrad, Norman

Title:

The weed of time

Journal:

Vertex, Vol. 1, No. 3

Publisher:

Mankind Publishing Co., Los Angeles

Pages:

58, 92–93

Date:

1973

Format:

Short story

Descriptor:

Drugs as mind-expanders

Annotation:

An exploratory mission to the fifth planet of the star Tau Ceti in 2048 discovers a plant that is given the name of Tempis ceti, seeds and leaves of which have a psychedelic property: they destroy the linear perception of time and enable the subject to view all moments along his lifespan simultaneously. Seeds of the plant prove to be fertile on Earth and the drug comes into common use. Protagonist is a time-drug user whose simultaneous perception of his 110-year lifespan sends him to a mental hospital.

AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX TO ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Abyss, The, 23

- Addicts, The, 25

- Aldiss, Brian W., 35, 40

- Anderson, Chester, 35

- As Dreams Are Made On, 51

- Barefoot in the Head, 40

- Barnes, Arthur K., 18

- Bartel, Philip J., 15

- Benford, James, 42

- Beyond Bedlam, 32

- Binder, Eando, 20

- Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 49

- Brave New World, 13

- Brunner, John, 49

- Buck, Doris Pitkin, 29

- Bug Jack Barron, 40

- Burgess, Anthony, 28

- Butterfly Kid, The, 35

- Camp Concentration, 38

- Carcinoma Angels, 37

- Clockwork Orange, A, 28

- Coblentz, Stanton A., 19

- Collins, Hunt, 32

- Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, 29

- Control Drug, The, 14

- Darkover Landfall, 49

- Davis, Grania, 45

- Devaux, Pierre, 26

- Diabolical Drug, The, 12

- Dick, Philip K., 33, 34, 36

- Dickson, Gordon R., 50

- Disch, Thomas, 38

- Down the Digestive Tract, 43

- Downward to the Earth, 44

- Dream-dust from Mars, 20

- Dying Inside, 48

- Elixir of Peace, The, 24

- Elixir of Progress, The, 15

- Emotion Gas, 19

- Emotion Solution, 18

- Eye of the Lens, The, 46

- Facial Justice, 27

- Fearn, John Russell, 14

- Final Programme, The, 39

- Fourth Profession, The, 47

- Free, Colin, 50

- Ganymede Takeover, The, 36

- Gatter, George F., 19

- Glowworm Flower, The, 19

- Gods of Zar, 51

- Golden Nemesis, 21

- Greenplace, 29

- Guin, Wyman, 32

- Gunn, James, 27

- Hall, Charles F., 21

- Hamilton, Edmond, 15

- Harris, Clare Winger, 12

- Harrison, Harry, 34

- Hartley, L. P., 27

- He Never Slept, 14

- Heinlein, Robert A., 24

- Hellflower, 25

- Herbert, Benson, 14

- Herbert, Frank, 38

- Hollis, H. H., 46

- Hormone Menace, The, 20

- How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?, 43

- How It Was When the Past Went Away, 39

- Huxley, Aldous, 13, 28

- I Remember Oblivion, 22

- Island, 28

- Jones, Langdon, 46

- Joy Makers, The, 27

- Keller, David H., 13, 23

- Kyle, David A., 21

- Lafferty, R. A., 42

- Lester, Irvin, 12

- Literary Corkscrew, The, 13

- Lupoff, Richard A., 36

- McCombs, Larry, 30

- MacDonald, John D., 23

- Make Room! Make Room!, 34

- Mind Parasites, The, 37

- Moorcock, Michael, 39

- Morrison, William, 25

- My Head’s In a Different Place Now, 45

- Nelson, Ray, 36, 47

- Night That All Time Broke Loose, The, 35

- Niven, Larry, 47

- No Direction Home, 48

- Now Wait for Last Year, 34

- One Million Centuries, 36

- Panshin, Alexei, 43

- Peacock King, The, 30

- Phillips, Rog, 26

- Plutonian Drug, The, 18

- Pohl, Frederik, 22

- Pratt, Fletcher, 12

- Pulse, 42

- Pumilia, Joseph F., 51

- Puppet Masters, The, 24

- Purdom, Tom, 29

- R-Master, The, 50

- Roger Bacon Formula, The, 12

- Rotsler, William, 51

- Santaroga Barrier, The, 38

- Scortia, Thomas N., 52

- Sheckley, Robert, 43

- Silverberg, Robert, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48

- Sky, 42

- Slesar, Henry, 22

- Smith, Clark Ashton, 18

- Smith, George O., 25

- Soft Kill, The, 50

- Spinrad, Norman, 37, 40, 48, 52

- Stolen Minute, The, 26

- Stone That Never Came Down, The, 49

- Stoned Counsel, 46

- Sundance, 41

- Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The, 33

- Time Drug, The, 21

- Time of Changes, A, 44

- Time Travel for Pedestrians, 47

- Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 32

- Trojan Horse Laugh, 23

- Truth Gas, The 15

- Viot, H. G., 26

- Vonnegut, Kurt, 41

- We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, 33

- Weariest River, The, 52

- Weed of Time, The, 52

- Welcome to the Monkey House, 41

- Wellman, Manly Wade, 20

- What to Do Until the Analyst Comes, 22

- White, Ted, 30

- Williams, Robert Moore, 24

- Wilson, Colin, 37

- World Inside, The, 45

- Yellow Pill, The, 26

DHEW Publication No. (ADM) 75-190

Printed 1975

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE

PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE

ALCOHOL, DRUG ABUSE, AND MENTAL HEALTH ADMINISTRATION

NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DRUG ABUSE

11400 ROCKVILLE PIKE

ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND 20852

Transcriber’s Note (continued)

Errors in punctuation and simple typos have been corrected without note. Archaic or variant spelling, inconsistent hyphenation, etc., has been left as it appears in the original publication unless as noted in the following:

Page iv – “science fiction” changed to “science-fiction” (Silverberg is the author of many science-fiction novels)

Page 3 – “science fictionists” changed to “science-fictionists” (for the speculations of science-fictionists)

Page 4 – “brain-washing” changed to “brainwashing” (analogous to brainwashing)

Page 5 – “science fiction” changed to “science-fiction” (Drug-users in science-fiction stories)

Page 5 – “Science fiction” changed to “Science-fiction” (Science-fiction writers tend to be no more radical)

Page 7 – “The Joymakers” changed to “The Joy Makers” (The Joy Makers, published in 1961)

Page 27 – “The Joymakers” changed to “The Joy Makers” (Title: The Joy Makers)

Page 27 – “noncomformity” changed to “nonconformity” (it lowers vitality and reduces nonconformity)

Page 43 – “science fiction” changed to “science-fiction” (In: Four Futures, a science-fiction anthology)

Page 54 – “Joymakers” changed to “Joy Makers” (Joy Makers, The)

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Table of Contents

DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION

FOREWORD

PREFACE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OVERVIEW OF DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMITIVE PERIOD (1900–1935)

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY PREDICTIVE PERIOD (1935–1965)

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (1965–Present)

AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX TO ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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