Following a devastating World War, the totalitarian nation Worldstate has taken over, remaining in a state of constant war with a neighboring nation, Universal State. Kall is in prison serving a long sentence for reasons we don’t yet know. Narrated in the first person past tense by protagonist Leo Kall, the story begins sometime in the twenty-first century. In 1981, the film was adapted to television as a two-part Swedish miniseries. The novel was nominated for the Retro-Hugo Award for the best science fiction novel of 1941. Kallocain has been called “a fascinating novel of the 1984 and Brave New World genre” by Library Journal.
Even so, Kall can’t help but administer the drug to his wife to determine if she has been faithful to him or has been having an affair with his boss, Edo Rissen. However, when Kall realizes the state is using his truth serum as a way to prosecute a person’s thoughts, he is hesitant to help. Kall names the drug Kallocain after himself. When Kall awakes one day to read the headline “Thoughts Can Be Judged,” he takes it upon himself to successfully create a truth serum to help the Worldstate control its citizens. Set in the twentieth century of the totalitarian Worldstate after a World War, Swedish author and poet Karin Boye’s bleak dystopian novel, Kallocain (1940), follows chemist Leo Kall, a dutiful worker and loyal citizen who creates a new wonder-drug that makes people speak the unfiltered truth.
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