Kall is idealistic and naïve, and is only too happy to persuade his superiors and the police to allow him to test the drug on various human volunteers. The drug, naturally, is named after its creator: kallocain. It’s the ultimate truth serum, in that it allows people to not only answer any questions put to them but speak truths they never knew they had. He is convinced his latest piece of work will be a great advancement in that respect: a drug which breaks down inhibitions. The narrator, Leo Kall, is nominally a scientist but is referred to as “soldier” by his fellow researchers and superiors, and all of his research is likewise directed towards the war in some form. Within this state one is either a soldier, a policeman, or an elite-in descending order of likelihood-and all things that do not serve the state or the war effort are suspect. Kallocain is set in a future of the same drab ugliness as 1984, a “Worldstate” that is one of several equally monolithic and mutually hostile power blocs. But we have it now, in a good translation by Gustav Lannestock, and it begs to be rediscovered by an audience for whom dystopia has become a near-synonym for the future that is unfortunately continuing to come true around us. Less than a year after the great and sad Kallocain saw print, Boye apparently committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, and the book itself did not even appear in English until 1966.

When her mother complemented her on the book, her response was “Do you really think it was I that did it?”-although it was clearly her book, given the toll it exacted on her emotionally. Nothing before it hinted that she would produce this bleak future vision, one informed more by the tightening grip of the Third Reich on Europe than by anything in her own life. Kallocain was the most out-of-gamut of her works. There from 1922 through 1940 she published several volumes of poetry and a few novels, all well-received by her peers. Neither the title, Kallocain, nor the author, Karin Boye, will be familiar to most readers outside of her native Sweden. Now I have to add a fourth to this list, one which might well accompany me on that same trip-and which has been sadly neglected even by many other fans of SF or dystopian fiction. I discovered it more or less on my own, re-read it time and again as new translations appeared over the years, and would gladly pack a copy on my next one-way trip to the moon. We, on the other hand, is nowhere nearly as well-known but every bit as crucial. The first two are almost stereotypically familiar in my case they were proscribed reading in high school, and few people need them compared or contrasted. There have traditionally been three great or at the very least formative dystopian novels of the 20th century: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 and Evgeny Zamyatin’s We.

Kallocain boye