Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a bitter satiric novel [6]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..

 

DRUG THEMES IN SCIENCE FICTION

by

Robert Silverberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77131/pg77131-images.html