Eight Science Fiction Stories About Drugs

Eight Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories About Drugs

Starting in the New Wave era, sci-fi writers began to examine drugs as a portal to recreation, mind expansion, strange phenomena, and maybe, too, some danger. These adventures borrowed heavily from the counterculture and the treatment of drugs in the alternative media (like underground comix).

The entry for drugs in the 'Science Fiction Encyclopedia' is broad, slotting recreational drugs in amongst drugs as agents for increasing intelligence, life extension, lie detection, physical transformation, aphrodesiacs, etc., etc. With the list below, I'm focusing on lesser-known short stories that depict 'trips' occasioned by recreational drugs. The trip can be good, it can be bad, but in the end, well, it's a trip !

I'm concentrating on stories that were released in the era covered by this blog (i.e., late 1960s to early 1990s), and as such, the stories (such as those published in the National Lampoon), are not easy to access. But hopefully, if this is a category you find engrossing, you can be on the lookout for the publications that contain these entries.

 

***

'Psychedelic Flight,' by Robert Ray: this tale appeared in the 1972 anthology ‘Generation: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction,’ edited by David Gerrold. In 'Flight,' some hippies find that their new choice of recreational drug triggers unpleasant revelations. This story stands alongside Harlan Ellison’s ‘Shattered Like A Glass Goblin,’ and Avram Davidson and Grania Davis’s ‘The New Zombies,’ as an effective treatment of the dark side of the hippie movement.
 

Then there’s Gerrold’s own entry: ‘All of Them Were Empty,’ from the same anthology, in which junkies Deet and Woozy enter a decaying tenement in search of a strange new trip.
 

In his introduction to the story, Gerrold proudly states that he wrote it spontaneously after smoking pot, and listening to the Donovan Leitch song Sunny Goodge Street. Ominously, Gerrold states that the published story is (aside for some grammatical corrections) a first draft. Be that as it may, under its 'trippy' prose, this story has a functioning plot and a convincing denouement. Hooray ? 

***

 

'Sleepwalkers,' a John Shirley story from 1988, showcases cyberpunk themes with its depiction of a group of junkies (the opening pages detail the process of cooking, and shooting up, meth) living in squalor in a bad neighborhood of a near-future Los Angeles. Needing money, would-be rock star guitarist Jules decides to temporarily rent his body to the Sleepwalkers Agency. Upon waking from his 'rental' period, Jules leaves the Agency 200 dollars richer.........but with an ache between his legs..............This story can be found in Shirley’s 1989 anthology ‘Heatseeker.’

***

'Lifeguard,' by Arthur Byron Cover: Bob Strawn has a part-time job as a pool lifeguard, and is enjoying a carefree summer, in Blackton, Virginia. That is, until he takes a toke of some really powerful ‘grass’…… This story can be found in the anthology ‘The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IV’ (1976).

 

***

Shirley’s 'Six Kinds of Darkness,' which first appeared in High Times magazine in 1988, and also is included in ‘Heatseeker,’ features a near-future New York City where the 'Hollow Head' drug den offers users a genuinely life-changing experience. The first page of the story is quintessential cyberpunk and, I would argue, an exemplar of how to begin any story, novelette, or novel in the genre. 

***

Chris Miller's 'Pipe Dream' is about a New York City slacker who finds some truly amazing 'grass'. 'Pipe Dream' mixes stoner and sci-fi themes in a comic fashion. It's a great story that should be an entrant in any anthology covering sci-fi and drugs. You can only find it in the National Lampoon, June 1972.

***

 

Another tale from Miller, ‘Telejester,’ from the August 1973 issue of the Lampoon, deals with a couch potato who does a little too many drugs….and brings strange things to life on TV screens. Everyone’s TV screens. This story has the absurdist quality that many New Wave sci-fi authors dearly wanted to express, but could not do as adroitly as Miller.

 

***

‘Black Coral,’ by Lucius Shepard, is about Prince, an American expat who lives a dissipated life on an island off the coast of Honduras. Prince makes a fateful decision to smoke a local blend called ‘black coral’, and winds up on a very, very bad trip………. This story first was printed in the anthology ‘Universe 14’ (1984) and also can be found in the anthology ‘The Jaguar Hunter’ (1989).