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.