“The drug can make a man the exact opposite of what he is…”

John Sturman has everything except the one thing that matters: the creative spark that would win the heart of Sylvia March, the woman who believes her soul can only mate with genius. But when his brother returns from India addicted to hashish, a doctor’s offhand remark reveals the drug’s most terrifying property: it can unlock a hidden self, a doppelgänger of brilliance, a spectre of pure artistic fire.
Long before Limitless imagined a pill that could unleash the mind’s full potential, George Chetwynd Griffith penned this haunting 1898 tale of a man who discovers the ultimate cognitive enhancer. Griffith was the Victorian era’s most popular writer of Scientific Romances, the genre that would eventually become known as science fiction.
Each night, under the drug’s spell, Sturman’s alter ego writes the exquisite fiction his waking self could never produce. Overnight, fame and love are his…. but there is a terrible cost to pay.
In the lineage of the divided-self nightmare of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and anticipating everything from Flowers for Algernon to the The Dark Fields and Limitless, this is a chilling, proto-science-fictional fable of chemically borrowed brilliance, and the Faustian price it exacts.