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.