Speculative fiction and Walter Besant
I have elsewhere defined fictional drugs as non-existent medicines, intended for human use, invented for the purposes of some forms of fiction, usually novels, but also plays or films, including TV dramas. I have discussed some fictional drugs in books written by a wide range of authors: Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Aldous Huxley, and J R R Tolkien,1 Anthony Burgess, Philip K Dick, and Larry Niven.2
Many examples of fictional drugs come from the realms of either science fiction or fantasy. Indeed, of the authors I have covered before, only Huxley and Burgess are generally known for having worked mostly outside those forms. However, there are other forms of fiction that have featured fictional drugs, within the wider field of speculative fiction.
The term “speculative fiction” has been used to encompass a range of different fictional subgenres, including not only science fiction and fantasy, but also horror, magical realism, alternative history, utopian and dystopian fiction, and folk tales. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attributes the earliest written instance of the term to Robert Heinlein in 1953, who wrote that “‘speculative fiction’ may be defined negatively as being fiction about things that have not happened.”3
However, earlier instances can be found. Here, for example, is an extract from an article in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine from 1889, in a review of a dystopian fantasy by Walter Besant, The Inner House4: “Mr Besant has, since the success of his utopian ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men,’ been very much in the air. In fact, he has become both a prophet and a reformer. Edward Bellamy, in ‘Looking Backward,’ and George Parsons Lathrop, in a short story, ‘The New Poverty,’ have followed the example of Anthony Trollope and Bulwer in speculative fiction put in the future tense. Mr Besant’s ‘Inner House’ is as clever as any of these efforts.”
Although the meaning of the term “speculative fiction” has been extended over the years to an increasing number of different subgenres, there is no doubt about its meaning in Maurice Egan’s review. In The Inner House Besant described a society in which a drug that confers longevity on its citizens has been developed, and it cautions against the dangers of immortality. “Science,” says the Professor whose invention it is, “can arrest decay. She can make you live—live on—live for centuries—nay, I know not—why not? —she can, if you foolishly desire it, make you live forever. … My discovery … strengthens the nerves, hardens the muscles, quickens the blood, and brings activity to the digestion. With new strength of the body returns new strength to the mind; mind and body are one.”
The idea of pharmacologically prolonging life is a speculation with which some are still obsessed.
Margaret Atwood
The Canadian author Margaret Atwood is best known for her novel the Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which falls within the genre of the futuristic dystopian novel. Atwood has very decided views about the nature of the different genres of speculative fiction5:
“What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such—things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don’t like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don’t fall within my skill set. Any seriously intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed. In a public discussion with Ursula Le Guin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by “science fiction” is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she classifies under “fantasy.” Thus, for her as for me—dragons would belong in fantasy, as would, I suppose, the film Star Wars and most of the TV series Star Trek. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might squeeze into Le Guin’s science fiction because its author had grounds for believing that electricity actually might be able to reanimate dead flesh. And The War of the Worlds? Since people thought at the time that intelligent beings might live on Mars, and since space travel was believed to be possible in the imaginable future, this book might have to be filed under Le Guin’s ‘science fiction’. Or parts of it might. In short, what Le Guin means by ‘science fiction’ is what I mean by ‘speculative fiction’, and what she means by ‘fantasy’ would include some of what I mean by ‘science fiction’. So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance.”
Atwood, who also used the term “wonder tale” as a synonym for “speculative fiction,” dedicated her book to Ursula Le Guin.
Atwood has written her own speculative fiction involving a fictional drug, Oryx and Crake (2003).
“The BlyssPluss Pill was designed to take a set of givens, namely the nature of human nature, and steer these givens in a more beneficial direction than the ones hitherto taken. It was based on studies of the now unfortunately extinct pygmy or bonobo chimpanzee, a close relative of Homo sapiens. Unlike the latter species, the bonobo had not been partially monogamous with polygamous and polyandrous tendencies. Instead it had been indiscriminately promiscuous, had not pair-bonded, and had spent most of its waking life, when it wasn’t eating, engaged in copulation.”
These observations led to the idea of the BlyssPluss: “The aim was to produce a single pill that, at one and the same time:
(a) would protect the user against all known sexually transmitted diseases, inconvenient or merely unsightly;
(b) would provide an unlimited supply of libido and sexual prowess, coupled with a generalised sense of energy and well being, thus reducing the frustration and blocked testosterone that led to jealous and violence, and eliminating feelings of low self-worth;
(c) would prolong youth.”
A fourth attribute would not be advertised: “The BlyssPluss Pill would also act as a sure-fire one-time-does-it-all birth-control pill, for male and female alike, thus automatically lowering the population level. This effect could be made reversible, though not in individual subjects, by altering the components of the pill as needed, i.e., if the populations of any one area got too low.”
BlyssPluss is linked to the Paradice Project, which involves extensive engineering of society, including eugenic manipulation and the use of RejoovenEsence, one of several “body-oriented Compounds”: “Gender, sexual orientation, height, colour of skin and eyes—it’s all on order, it can all be done or redone.”
However, Oryx and Crake belongs to the dystopian variety of speculative fiction, not the utopian, and, as we learn later in the book, the worst is yet to come. Read on.
Other dystopian novels
The list of dystopian novels is a long one. For those interested in exploring the genre, here are a few other titles that involve fictional drugs.
Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (1994): “Blanketrol is very crude stuff. It was the original prototype for Forgettol. They withdrew it when they found out it was completely hollowing out the inner life of the test subjects. The users went on functioning, but just by rote. … Think of it as the opposite of deja vu—nothing reminds you of anything, not even of itself.”
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996): “The incredibly potent DMZ is apparently classed as a para-methoxylated amphetamine but really it looks to Pemulis from his slow and tortured survey of the MED.COM’s monographs more like more similar to the anticholinergic-deliriant class, way more powerful than mescaline or MDA or DMA or TMA or MDMA or DOM or STP or the I.V.-ingestible DMT (or Ololiuqui or datura’s scopolamine, or Fluothane, or Bufotenine (a.k.a. ‘Jackie-O.’), or Ebene or psilocybin or CylertS¢; DMZ resembling chemically some miscegenation of a lysergic with a muscimoloid, but significantly different from LSD-25 in that its effects are less visual and spatially-cerebral and more like temporally-cerebral and almost ontological, with some sort of manipulated-phenylkylamine-like speediness whereby the ingester perceives his relation to the ordinary flow of time as radically (and euphorically, is where the muscimole-affective resemblance shows its head) altered. The incredibly potent DMZ is synthesized from a derivative of fitviavi, an obscure mold that grows only on other molds, by the same ambivalently lucky chemist at Sandoz Pharm. who’d first stumbled on LSD, as a relatively ephebic arid clueless organic chemist, while futzing around with ergotic fungi on rye. DMZ’s discovery was the tail-end of the B.S. 1960s, just about the same time Dr. Alan Watts was considering T. Leary’s invitation to become ‘Writer in Resonance’ at Leary’s utopian LSD-25 colony in Millbrook NY on what is now Canadian soil. A substance even just the accidental synthesis of which sent the Sandoz chemist into early retirement and serious unblinking wall-watching, the incredibly potent DMZ has a popular-laychemical-underground reputation as the single grimmest thing ever conceived in a tube. It is also now the hardest recreational compound to acquire in North America after raw Vietnamese opium, which forget it.”
White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985): “We were to be test subjects in the development of a super experimental and top secret drug, code-name Dylar, that he’d been working on for years. He’d found a Dylar receptor in the human brain and was putting the finishing touches on the tablet itself. … They isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain. Dylar speeds relief to that sector.” “But he also told me there were dangers in running tests on a human. I could die. I could live but my brain could die. The left side of my brain could die but the right side could live. This would mean that the left side of my body would live but the right side would die. There were many grim specters. I could walk sideways but not forward. I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said ‘speeding bullet,’ I would fall to the floor and take cover. Mr. Gray wanted me to know the risks. There were releases and other documents for me to sign. The firm had lawyers, priests.”
You have been warned.
