On 6 May 2024 14:19:23 -0000, jdnicoll@panix.com (James Nicoll) wrote:

Five SF Works About Mind-Altering Drugs

From Huxley's Brave New World to Akira's Neo-Tokyo, science fiction
has dreamed up some very strange and powerful drugs...

https://reactormag.com/five-sf-works-about-mind-altering-drugs/

In the case of Brave New World... you didn't mention that each use of
Soma shortens one's life by a year.

Then in Carcinoma Angels... it's still a mystery about how a
mind-altering drug could alterl a problem with one's body, a thing in
reality, not one's experience of it.

The fact that rich men can control what people regard as desirable in
their own reality... doesn't give them, when they're fictional
characters, the power to control what readers of the books they're in
consider acceptable. But at the time this book was written, we hadn't
achieved the situation where famines only happened locally in the
Third World when food distribution was disrupted locally by war.

So I'm not surprised that sterilizing millions of Third World women
might well have raised fewer eyebrows back then, as preferable to
millions of babies in the Third World dying agonizing deaths from
starvation. That could not be prevented by the rich world just beilng
more generous, because exponential growth has a way of expanding out
of the reach of anything.

Akira: well, the scientists had to be where the big libraries were. I
guess this was before the Internet was invented.

John Savard

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