Drugs in literature -- Bibliography; Science fiction, American -- Bibliography; Science fiction, English -- Bibliography
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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