Any good psychedelic science fiction out there?

[Alien Dynasty]

It's hard for me to put my finger on this, but I'm looking for some really bizarre, surreal stuff with wacked out imagery and creatures. It doesn't necessarily have to be sci-fi, either.

[northernexposure]

Almost anything by Philip K. Dick, Disch's On the Wings of Song. I just finished Ready Player One, which includes a lot of virtuality. 1Q84, by Murakami is certainly bizarre and surreal.

[Alex, The G and T]

Night of Light -- Philip Jose Farmer. Toatally, trippin', man...

Explicitly cited, by Jimi Hendrix, as the inspiration to the song Purple Haze.


Actually, a lot of Farmer is drug fueled: Riders of the Purple Wage, The Purple Book.... Just a couple off the top of my head...

What is this thing about "purple?"
***
For whacked out critters.... Clifford D. Simak's obscure "Destiny Doll" has an insane bestiary of mind-tweaking fauna; as does a lot of lesser known Simak: The Big Back Yard, The Visitors, The Fellowship of the Talisman eg feature a lot of WTF moments, and weird-ass critters.

Cordwainer Smith had to have been on Drugs. All of his stuff. The Nostrilia cycle specifically about weird drugs.

***
Oh... So was Dune. Heheeh

[j. d. worthington]

Rather unlikely about Cordwainer Smith (Dr. Paul Linebarger), but an interesting thought. As for the two "purple" references... "Riders of the Purple Wage" is actually a central piece in The Purple Book, and the "purple" here is an ironic reference to being "born to the purple"....

Not necessarily featuring strange creatures, etc., but a fair amount of what emerged from the "New Wave" was connected to psychedelia, and could at times be quite... odd. (Also frequently very good.) Take, for instance, Brian Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head, dealing with events of "the Acid Head War"... certainly a stylistic tour-de-force where language is stretched to its limits on a variety of levels. J. G. Ballard's novels (and short stories, for the matter of that) often have a lot of surrealistic imagery and ideation: The Drowned World being the most "normal", perhaps, becoming increasingly surrealistic with The Drought, The Crystal World, several of the pieces in The Voices of Time. Vermilion Sands, etc.... And then there's always that extreme example, The Atrocity Exhibition....

You might also find several of the stories in Dangerous Visions, and Again. Dangerous Visions, of interest (in fact, DV was the original place of publication of Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage"), not to mention Judith Merrill's England Swings SF, and Langdon Jones' The New SF. (Speaking of Farmer... I would think Strange Relations would be precisely the sort of thing you're looking for... sf alien encounters as seen through the lenses of Freud and Jung.) Some of Moorcock's works might also appeal, such as the five-volume-plus (the "plus" being occasional short stories, such as the recent "Sumptuous Dress") Dancers at the End of Time sequence, or The Time Dweller, The Rituals of Infinity, The Black Corridor, The Shores of Death, and some of the tales in Moorcock's Book of Martyrs... also known as Dying for Tomorrow in American editions.

I've been mentioning him a lot, but some of Ellison's works have always been viewed as being rather psychedelic, especially those written from ca. 1962-1980... ironic, as they come from a man who has an extreme antipathy to putting any such substance, including alcohol, into his system. (Ted Sturgeon's piece in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream has something to say about this.) And even some of Sturgeon's work has its elements of the psychedelic, from "The Golden Helix" to "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff"....

[Teresa Edgerton]

I suggest Memory Seed, Glass, Flowercrash or Urbis Morpheus, all by Stephen Palmer.

[gully_foyle]

If you want really whacked out, maybe try The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson.

[Dave]

Good suggestions so far, some of them I was going to also add.

What about also Jeff Noon and Jasper Fforde?

[Toby Frost]

The Traveler in Black by John Brunner is pretty surreal, as is Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Nights at the Circus is quite strange as well.

Aldiss has been mentioned: Report on Probability A is one of the oddest books I have ever read. Avram Davidson wrote some peculiar short stories, and some of Ballard's short stories have a rather trippy feel.

[J-WO]

A great contemporary one is 'The Beloved of my Beloved' by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia, a story collection printed by Newcon Press (owned by Ian Whates of this parish). Very, VERY dark and twisted. But also possibly an act of unalloyed genius.

[Stephen Palmer]

Thank-you to Teresa for mentioning my first three novels, which do, ahem, have a psychedelic edge.

For true psychedelia can I recommend my very own Hallucinating, which has the psychedelic experience at its core. And cameo appearances from quite a few psych musicians...

[Extollager]

Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and MacDonald's Lilith could be read this way.

[Connavar]

Heh wonderful thread idea, im a big fan of these kind of stories.

As avid PKD reader you tend to get a taste for surreal,bizzare SF stories.

Dangerous Visions SF Masterwork edition and that wave of 60s SF is very interesting to me.

[dask]

If the great mix-master in my head isn't going full blast it seems to me the last story in Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH was s one of the most bizarre I remember reading. Don't remember the exact details but I could hardly believe what I was reading. Reality turning upside down in his short story "The Men Return" shouldn't fail to entertain the psychedelically inclined. And William Burroughs's THE NAKED LUNCH might spark you plug.

[Nerds_feather]

Originally Posted by northernexposure

Almost anything by Philip K. Dick, Disch's On the Wings of Song. I just finished Ready Player One, which includes a lot of virtuality. 1Q84, by Murakami is certainly bizarre and surreal.

seconded on PKD and Disch. 1Q84 is also bizarre and surreal, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it...still have about 150 pages left to go, and I have a complex love/hate relationship to the book.

another author i HIGHLY recommend is JG Ballard.

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by dask

If the great mix-master in my head isn't going full blast it seems to me the last story in Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH was s one of the most bizarre I remember reading. Don't remember the exact details but I could hardly believe what I was reading. Reality turning upside down in his short story "The Men Return" shouldn't fail to entertain the psychedelically inclined. And William Burroughs's THE NAKED LUNCH might spark you plug.

You mean DE collection or the Dying Earth omnibus that ends with Rhialto the Marvelous stories. The last story was the weirdest in the omnibus to me.

"Morreion"
Rhialto and his associates journey to the edge of the Universe to seek their erstwhile colleague Morreion, sent away in the distant past to locate the source of the valuable, magic-anulling IOUN stones.

Jack Vance Treasury collection have: The Men Return, The Secret, The New Prime that fit in very well with this thread.