In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first cen
tury, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the
user to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch ret
urns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is
far more potent than Can-D, but threatens to plunge the world into a permanent s
tate of drugged illusion controlled by the mysterious Eldritch.