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"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research. I just enjoy reading the stuff, and some of it sticks in my mind and fits into the stories."
- Frederik Pohl
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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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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
