Kallocain is a 1940 dystopian novel by Swedish novelist Karin Boye that envisions a future of drab terror.
Seen through the eyes of the idealistic scientist Leo Kall, Kallocain is a depiction of a totalitarian world state.
One of the novel's central ideas coincides with contemporary rumors of truth drugs that ensured the subordination of every citizen to the state.
Both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Boye's Kallocain are drug dystopias, or societies in which pharmacology is used to suppress opposition to authority.
Major themes include the notion of the self in a totalitarian state, the meaning of life, and the power of love.