Page:Drug Themes in Science Fiction (Research Issues 9).djvu/15

 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, delicious , 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. . . " Those malcontents and non-comformists who cannot accept the soft mechanical pleasures of Huxley's brave new world are exiled to remote islands.

, in, 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 (1962), his outlook on mind-altering drugs was far more sympathetic. In this ideal state of the future one uses not the soporific but the ecstasy-invoking, a mind-expanding hallucinogen. Concerning 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 -medicine, the reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved." Huxley is really talking about LSD, and his tone is that of the acid-evangelist.

Drug as contemptible anodyne, drug as gateway to higher reality—those are the poles bounding the handling of drugs in science