Page:Drug Themes in Science Fiction (Research Issues 9).djvu/14

 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 (1932) is a bitter satiric novel