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
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.)
Transcriber’s Note
The cover image was restored by Thiers Halliwell and is granted to the public domain.
See the end of this document for details of corrections and other changes.
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.
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
[iii]
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.
[v]
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 [vi] 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.
[vii]
| 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 |
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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.
[4]
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 [5] 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 [6]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 [7]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, [8] 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.
[9]
[10]
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.
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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)