Pygmalion's Spectacles

Stanley Grauman Weinbaum was an American science fiction writer. His career in science fiction was short but influential. He is best known for the groundbreaking science fiction short story, A Martian Odyssey," which presented a sympathetic but decidedly non-human alien, Tweel. Even more remarkably, this was his first science fiction story. Isaac Asimov has described this story as "a perfect Campbellian science fiction story, before John W. Campbell. Indeed, Tweel may be the first creature in science fiction to fulfil Campbell's dictum, 'write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man'." Dan Burke steps out of a stuffy New York City party hoping to get some air and peace in Central Park, but instead he meets a gnomelike man who asks him, "But what is reality?." Sci-fi luminary Stanley G. Weinbaum first broke through with the hugely influential story A Martian Odyssey, one of the first to depict an alien being in a somewhat sympathetic light. The short tale Pygmalion's Spectacles is no less innovative: it centers around the implications of a technology that's surprisingly close to what we now call virtual reality.