(1971), Colin Wilson’s eleventh novel, adopts the form of the spy thriller to explore ideas about human potential and the possibilities of evolution. It is set sometime in the later 1960s or early 1970s, after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Soviet Union and the Communist states of Eastern Europe are still very much in existence and the Cold War is ongoing. The central symbol of the novel and the focus of its thriller action is, as its title indicates, the lightproof and soundproof “black room” used from 1954 for the sensory deprivation experiments at Princeton University in the USA which are described in Jack A. Vernon’s
Inside the Black Room(1963). The seed of
The Black Room, like that of Wilson’s seventh novel,
The Mind Parasites(1967),…
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Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "The Black Room". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23938, accessed 19 April 2024.]
