From David Langford
Has anyone noted the anticipation of your “spiders on drugs” story (This Week, 29 April) in a 1968 sci-fi novel, Charles Harness’s The Ring of Ritornel? At one point the drugged hero’s blood is fed to a spider and the nature of the drug deduced from the resulting web pattern: it’s a mind-controlling “slave drug”, so naturally the spider ends up imprisoned in her own 3D web.
From the book: “A spider dosed with a little alcohol weaves a drunken web. If stimulated with caffeine, she will build one which is a model of engineering precision. With mushroom drugs, she builds one circular strand with a couple of spokes, then hangs in the centre, a spider god in a spider universe.”
