Question: Which author came up with the idea for electronics leading into the pleasure center of the brain first? I’ve read about them in Niven, read a vague reference to ‘K Dick wireheads’ in an abysmal rip-off of ‘Starship Troopers’ by John Steakly, and remember the ‘buttonheads’ of F. Paul Wilson’s future history with fondness.
So, who was first?
(You will note that I did not name the Arachnoid Thief of Sci-fi as a possible candidate. I will continue to not do so. Nyar.)
Bet you forgot about this one. Am bumping it because no one bothered to reply. Have to say that the earliest reference to a “wirehead” that I know of, dates from Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, which dates from 1959.
That’s earlier than Niven’s - he first uses it in The Ringworld Engineers, which was written in 1980.
Does the wirehead in Naked Lunch have the same idea – electrical current to the pleasure center of the brain. My copy is in spanish and I don’t remember cathcing it.
BTW is he (WSB) still alive?
Niven first used it a long time before Ringworld. It was central to the plot of “Death BY Ecstacy” (originally titled “The Organleggers”) first published in 1969. He may have referred to it in a slightly earlier story - his work goes back to about 1965 or so. That still doesn’t go back as far as Burroughs.
WSB died a few years back. As I recall, the characters do have the pleasure center hooked up (I don’t have time to reread the book to find the exact page) and are called wireheads.
Cordwainer Smith also uses this device (though not the term “wirehead”) in the story “Golden the Ship Was–Oh! Oh! Oh!”, which was published in April 1959.
Clarification on Niven - while the concept is central to “Death By Ecstasy”[sup]1[/sup], I browsed through the text in my copy of “The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton”, and didn’t see the term - he reffered to it as “current addiction”. However, I did find the term in “The Defenseless Dead”, another Gil Hamilton story first published in 1973. The concept AND term had definitely been established in Niven’s “Known Space” stuff long before Ringworld.
[sup]1[/sup] - written and retitled long before the arrival of MDMA on the drug scene, the story’s title probably conjures up a wrong image for many modern readers. If I were an editor anthologizing it today, I might return to “The Organleggers”.
Spider Robinson also used this idea in one of his stories (God is an Iron?).
But my guess is that the idea took off from the real world experiments done on rats which demonstrated this effect. Anyone know when these were first being publicized?
A WAG would have them being done in 1957 at the latest (it taking roughly two years for a book to go from submission to publication), assuming that Burroughs had heard of the experiments and that was what inspired him. (He claims to not remember writing Naked Lunch due to his heroin addiction.)
Dan Simmons used the wirehead images splendidly in the Hyperion series- especially the brief scene of a view into a room occupied (if you can call it that) by three women, grandmother, mother and daughter, emaciated and either near death or dead, wired up to consoles as well as using injectable drugs. The writer tells us helpfully that someone probably comes in every few days to clean them up and hook up an IV “feed bag.”
Icky. And I used to like drugs… 