Futureshock

Given the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).

Then there were those authors, chief among them Philip K. Dick, who refracted the psychedelic experience into fictions altogether stranger and more opaque. Perhaps it is the aseptic nature of the current psychedelic revival – grounded in clinical trials rather than acid tests, its figureheads more likely to sport lab coats than kaftans – that has so far obviated against a fresh wave of psychedelic literature.