OVERVIEW OF DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION
Defining science fiction is no easy task. Some of the definitions that have been proposed are so loose that they would qualify a book like Sinclair Lewis' Arrowsmith as science fiction—it surely is "fiction about science"—and others are drawn so narrowly that they would exclude much of what is published today in science-fiction magazines and books. With that caveat in mind, therefore, I offer one of the more flexible definitions, one which I think does cover the greater part of what I understand to be science fiction:
Science fiction is that branch of fantasy which engages in
imaginative speculation about the impact of technology on human society.
By classing science fiction as a branch of fantasy, I make it a subdivision of that vast literary genre that includes Homer's Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Norse sagas, Alice in Wonderland, much of Poe, and so forth. Placing the emphasis on technology, however, requires science fiction to have a certain systematic content, an underlying rationale of theme. A story about a vampire is pure fantasy; a story that rationalizes vampirism in terms of metabolic phenomena is science fiction. It is the attempt at inducing a willing suspension of disbelief by supplying a plausible scaffolding for the implausible that gives science fiction its identity within the greater realm of fantasy.
But because science fiction is a form of fantasy, it is ideally suited for the exploration of drug-related phenomena. A drug is a kind of magic wand; but it is a chemist's magic wand, a laboratory product, carrying with it the cachet of science. By offering his characters a vial of green pills or a flask of mysterious blue fluid the author is able to work wonders as easily as a sorcerer; and by rigorously examining the consequences of his act of magic, he performs the exploration of speculative ideas which is the essence of science fiction.
So in the nineteenth century Robert Louis Stevenson produced Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly devised an elixir of immortality in The Mortal Immortal, and H. G. Wells created a whole shelf of drug-related stories, speeding up human motion in "The New Accelerator," turning beasts into men in The Island of Dr. Moreau, depicting an unseeable phantom in The Invisible Man. And in the present century the use of mind-altering or mind-controlling drugs has become one of the prime vehicles for the speculations of science fictionists.
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