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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Phantomatic Generator (Virtual Reality) | ||
| A computer-generated experience. |
| What can a person connected to a phantomatic generator experience? Everything. He can climb the Alps, wander around the Moon without a spacesuit or an oxygen mask, conquer medieval towns or the North Pole while heading a committed team and wearing shining armor. He can be cheered by crowds as a marathon winner or the greatest poet of all time and receive a Nobel Prize from the hands of the Swedish king; he can love Madame de Pompadour and be loved back by her; he can enter into a duel with Iago to avenge Othello or get stabbed himself by Mafia hitmen. He can also experience enormous eagle’s wings growing on his back; he can fly and then become a fish again and spend his life on a coral reef; as a shark he can career with his mouth wide open toward his victims; he can even capture the swimmers, eat them with great relish, and digest them with gusto in a quiet corner of his underwater cave. […]
He can be a prophet, with an additional guarantee that all his prophecies will be fulfilled one-hundred percent; he can die and be resurrected many times over. |
| Technovelgy from Summa Technologiae,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Not Known in 1964 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the Telepadion Instructor from An Adventure on Eros (1931) by J. Harvey Haggard, the magic spectacles from Pygmalion's Spectacles (1935) by Stanley G. Weinbaum, the Saga technology from Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956) and by four and a half decades The Eden Cycle. I'd also mention the feelies from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), although the feelies did not offer a fully immersive experience, and stimsim from William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984).
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
