Stanley G. Weinbaum 31 min read

'But what is reality?' asks the gnomelike man, and offers Dan Burke a pair of spectacles that will plunge him wholly into a dream so vivid it cannot be told from waking life.

Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 story is a landmark hard-SF and social-SF tale, one of the earliest visions of virtual reality. Prophetic, imaginative, remarkable. Read it for a foundational story that imagined immersive VR decades before the technology, complete with sight, sound, taste, and touch.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

31 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).