What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy scene after Ford and Arthur are improbably rescued by the Heart of Gold and are suffering various side-effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive: Ford briefly turns into a penguin, Arthur's limbs start to detach from his body, and later the two encounter "an infinite number of monkeys" who want to show them their version of a Shakespeare play. What do you mean, it's not a Mushroom Samba?

"Hell, how am I going to operate my digital watch now?!

  • The monkeys can be explained (kind of) as it is a reference to an explanation of probability that states that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly could come up with (given enough time) the Complete Works of Shakespeare
  • The Movie has fun with this; The first time the drive is fired to take them to Viltvodle VI, they turn into sofas. They maintain calm for exactly three seconds. When they use it again to go to Magrathea, they transform into knitted dolls. Arthur vomits yarn.
  • Douglas Adams, the author, in the foreword of the omnibus edition, says that he originally came up with the idea while he was lying, drunk, in a field in Innsbruck, Austria. Played straight here.
  • Most books by Philip K. Dick. Some particularly notable examples include The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly, but it really applies to nearly all of his books. He reportedly never used LSD, but had hallucinations anyway (epilepsy or schizophrenia are possible causes). He wrote all of his books published before 1970 on amphetamines (ironically A Scanner Darkly was the first full novel NOT to be written on them), which enabled him to write incredibly quickly, sometimes towards 60 pages of finished copy per day. He was also got mixed up with the 1970s drug culture - the basis for A Scanner Darkly.

Ah, well, my writing falls into two degrees, the writing done under the influence of drugs and the writing I've done when I'm not under the influence of drugs. But when I'm not under the influence of drugs I write about drugs. I took amphetamines for years in order to get energy to write. I had to write so much in order to make a living because our pay rates were so low. In five years I wrote sixteen novels, which is incredible. I mean, nobody, I don't think anybody's ever done it before. And without amphetamines I couldn't have written that much. But as soon as I began to earn enough money so that I didn't have to write so many books, I stopped taking amphetamines. So now I don't take anything like that. And I never wrote anything under the influence of psychedelics. For instance, Palmer Eldritch I wrote without ever having even seen psychedelic drugs. -- Philip K. Dick

    • His most famous novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and its movie adaptation, Blade Runner, is one of his LEAST messed up works, yet can still be hard for many people to follow. This lead to the studio forcing Harrison Ford to record rather horrible narration to explain what was going on. Except that half the time it explained something completely different, making the movie even trippier if you actually pay attention.
  • Frank Herbert was also no stranger to mind-expanding substances, and they're included in some form, usually as a central theme, in every one of his works.
  • Neuromancer reads like a junkie travelogue: Case and his group rob people, "jack in", move to a new place to evade capture, all while really surreal shit is thrown in our faces. The amount of drugs Gibson did in his youth would corroborate this.
    • The lengths Case goes to to get drugs that he can actually get high from, and Rivera's drug-fueled holographic craziness.
  • There is a persistent belief (even on this very wiki page, see below) that Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland while stoned out of his mind on opium or hallucinogens. The book contains scenes of mushrooms causing Alice to grow and shrink, talking animals, a caterpillar smoking a hookah, the list goes on. The argument is unfortunately pure fantasy, since Carroll was by all accounts an upstanding, devout, model Victorian of the upper-middle class and not the sort of person to experiment with mind-altering substances. He didn't even drink! All instances of "drug references" can be easily explained away by pointing out that Alice is both a children's book and a satire of Victorian society. Many of the characters are direct references to people Alice and Carroll knew personally.
    • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865. During this time heroin and cocaine were a common ingredient in cough medicine, coca-cola, and other things. It is possible for him to have used one of these substances during his writing of Alice
      • Granted, it's remotely possible, but a teetotaling mathematician isn't likely to consume enough low-dose medicinal cocaine to hallucinate. Also heroin (itself) and coca-cola didn't exist until 1874 and 1886 respectively.
    • For example, the caterpillar smokes a hookah because he is a satire of British generals of the day, many of whom lived in India and indulged in opium.
    • There are many MANY interpretations of those books. One says it's a satire of Victorian society, another says it's a Freudian tract disguised as a children's book. One says it was actually meant to be horror story disguised as a children's book. The list goes on and on and on. That's how messed up it is. Or how messed up we are.
    • There is a marvelous book titled The Annotated Alice that gives footnotes and references for all the analogies, allegories, and logic puzzles in the Alice stories, edited by famed mathematical puzzles dude Martin Gardner. Suffice to say, the annotations contain nearly as much text as the original stories.
    • Also 'Alice in Sunderland', which shows how merely growing up in the city of Sunderland could cover it all; local legend, people, and history.
    • A more recent theory is that it was making fun of the newfangled and confusing mathematical concepts being invented at the time, like imaginary numbers. The theory is that Lewis created Wonderland to give an idea of the sheer insanity one would find in a world built on such patently ludicrous ideas.
      • Ideas that are now actually quite common and heavily used in advanced sciences.
    • One hypothesis concerning some of the odder characters is that they were inspired by hallucinations brought on by migraine headaches.
    • The scenes where Alice gets bigger/smaller are supposedly based off the author's own experiences; he reportedly suffered from what's now (colloquially) known as Lewis Carroll Syndrome, a mental disorder where an ordinary object, for example a tea cup, is seen as either much bigger (ie, the size of a car) or much smaller (like in a child's tea set) than it actually is.
  • Parts of the Illuminatus!-trilogy almost certainly were made on drugs, considering that its authors were major proponents of drug-legalization in real life. There are many scenes in which the protagonists indulge in cannabis and LSD, with detailed descriptions of the effects. The extremely non-linear narrative along with sudden jumps to surreal imagery that has little to no bearing to the plot probably reflects the points where the authors themselves decided to indulge some.
  • Robert Rankin's work sometimes borders on this. Sometimes, as in The Dance Of The Voodoo Handbag, he has publicly admitted to using drugs while writing it. And it shows.
  • The works of H.P. Lovecraft seem so twisted and surreal, and often even involve drug use by the characters themselves, that the Cthulhu Mythos experienced a huge surge in popularity throughout the drug culture of the 1960s and '70s, whose members assumed he must've written his stories under the influence of something. Lovecraft himself, however, was a neurotically strict and sheltered intellectual who never touched drugs or alcohol, and dismissed sex as a distraction for "lesser minds".
    • Heroin was legal, and found in common cough medicine, until 1924. Before 1924 was mostly Lovecraft's Dream Cycle period. In the story Celephais the protagonist, Kuranes, "began buying drugs to increase his periods of sleep". This could be indicative of Lovecraft's own habits, as he used his dreams for inspiration rather than straight up illegal drugs.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien faced much the same assumptions about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from the exact same hippie/stoner fans, particularly a widespread belief that Gandalf's pipeweed is really pot. That's in spite of the prologue to The Fellowship of the Rings saying that "it was a variety, probably, of Nicotiana" and Bilbo himself calling it "tabacco" at the end of The Hobbit.
    • "Your love of the halflings' leaf has surely slowed your mind."
      • "Finest weed in the South Farthing!"
  • The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Nightfall. I don't know what she was thinking.
  • Imajica, a fantasy/horror novel and Radical Feminist tract by British author Clive Barker. Features drugs, sex, violence, more sex, magic, making people's heads explode by magic, creepy disturbing sex, torture, speaking in tongues, and messianic prophecies... and that's just what happens to the main character.
    • The Abarat series. Seems Barker painted 300 oil paintings containing very weird characters and settings. Then he came up with a story for them to "live in".
  • One downright Mind Screwy Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel was once described with the phrase "...when I read an 8DA [[[Eighth Doctor Adventures]]] and start believing that someone has stuck some LSD in my Evian bottle..." by someone who liked the book.
    • Doctor Who Expanded Universe novelists are not paid in money, they're given another hit of the drug of their choice.
    • The Eighth Doctor Adventures novels Interference and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street were written by an author who once blogged about how the medication he was on was giving him bizarrely realistic dreams which seemed to take place over a matter of months, which, naturally, was making it difficult to tell what was really real. It kind of shows in his writing, at times. There are some flat-out trippy passages in Henrietta Street. And then there's almost a nested form of this trope; the Doctor tries writing a book, and what he writes is even trippier, to the point that a recipe reads as a description of an Eldritch Abomination. It's Lampshaded:

These ‘turn back!’-style warnings are common in the mystical texts of the period, though usually if there’s a reference to demons it’s code for the creatures of the reader’s own psyche, terrible things one can see if exposing oneself to too many poisonous vapours. In fact, there’s a sense in which the Doctor’s journey reads like a hallucinatory experience, at least partly brought on by the smoke.

    • Faction Paradox is this when combined with a large side of horror and pure distilled awesome.
    • The Virgin New Adventures novel Sky Pirates! or the Eyes of Schirron—a book that existed to showcase as many bad puns and silly sex jokes as the author could get away with. Interestingly enough it sold well enough for the author, Dave Stone, to be invited back for at least one direct sequel.
  • Friday the 13th (film): Death Moon. The author had a habit of going on nonsensical rants that have nothing to do with what little story there is. There's one part that's just pages and pages talking about nothing but Bride of Frankenstein star Elsa Lanchester in a disjointed fashion...
  • Thomas Pynchon reputedly wrote parts of Gravity's Rainbow while on acid, and afterward couldn't remember what his intentions had been. Even the less hallucinatory sections are still pretty weird.
  • Sections of American Psycho seem to delve into this trope, though Your Mileage May Vary since Patrick Bateman was, it should go without saying, Ax Crazy.
    • And a habitual drug user himself.
  • Anthony Trollope has a passage whose obvious interpretation has changed in the last century in The Small House at Allington: on being pressed for information about a lady-love with the initials "L. D.", Johnny Eames insists that his true love is "L. S. D.", a slang term not for acid (which hadn't been invented yet), but money (pounds, shillings, pence).
  • Michael Moorcock admits to having written much of his more throwaway 1960s and 1970s work on amphetamines, purely in order to work fast and make money. Although he has described his working method at the time as involving planning the plots carefully over several days sober, then taking lots of speed and writing the book in 24 hours or so.
  • Stephen King wrote that he was so plastered while working on Cujo that he's unable to remember writing it. However, this is an inversion - he actually was on drugs, but despite this, the novel is not surreal or incomprehensible.
    • He has also admitted to being very big into hallucinogens in the late 60s, which was also about the time he started piecing together the premise of The Dark Tower.
  • Averted by William S. Burroughs, who admitted that everything he wrote was in at least in some part autobiographical of his drug episodes and the times in between. He's the main character of Junkie, after all.
    • Parts of Naked Lunch, probably, were written while Burroughs was still an opiate addict (not by design, but as a matter of need). His preferred creative tool was majoun (highly-concentrated cannabis cooked into a sort of candy; think of it as pot brownies turned Up to Eleven). Even this drug use was primarily for imagination- and imagery-producing-enhancement; during sessions geared more toward production and editing, he was sober (mostly).
    • Burroughs and his biographers created a myth of the young outlaw junkie-poet gathering experiences (both mind-blowing and degrading) to be committed to paper during his later, more sensible years. In fact Burroughs—like so many "ex-junkies"—never entirely lost his desire for narcotics. Only now—after his death—are more-complex truths becoming apparent: he had significant relapses into opiate use. Which was not an impairment to the degree one might expect.
  • Dr. Seuss's drawings and ideas look so trippy...
  • Most Kurt Vonnegut's books are hard to summarize simply because their plots really do sound like something only a crackhead could think up. Like Cat's Cradle, which goes something like this:
    • Well, there's this dude that is writing a book on the atomic bomb, so he interviews the three kids of one of the leading scientists, only one is missing, one is a clarinet freak, and the last is a midget. Oh yeah, and they all travel to a Caribbean island where they take part in Bokonism and hang out with this dictator dude, only then the world ends because said dictator dropped and ice cube into the ocean. And there is much lusting after a teenage sex icon.
  • The poem "Kubla Khan" would have been a lot longer had Samuel Coleridge not been interrupted from his writing of it by the infamous "person from Porlock". He had taken two grains of opium before he put pen to paper, and the vision faded while he was desperately trying to get said Porlock resident to leave.
  • The short story "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"... if it wasn't written while the author was high... The quest for the Abba Dingo on a floating highway surrounded by clouds and the machine at the end engraves messages in people's hands.
  • Chapter 3 of Brave New World starts out normally enough (well, as it can be), but quickly becomes so fragmented and random (cutting from one scene to another with increasing frequency, finally becoming a sequence of disjointed one-sentence paragraphs) that the reader gets the distinct impression that the author was indulging in some hallucinogenic substances while writing it. Considering that the author in question is Aldous Huxley, this is definitely a possibility.
  • The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. Purportedly written by Paracelsus, supposedly an alchemical text by way of allegory, actually reading it without background makes you wonder what the writer was on.
  • The writings of Pantheist Giordano Bruno sound quite deluded and insane, for something written by a supposed "martyr of science".
    • Given that the man was, in fact, a practicing occultist (and that's what the church actually got him for), sounding deluded and insane is probably about par.
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