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. Written in 1935, 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.

Here is the story that presented virtual reality to the world. Dan Berk meets an Elfin professor who has invented a pair of goggles that allow the wearer to enter completely into the action of a story. Sometimes it can be hard to remember that it isn't real, or is it?

Pygmalion's Spectacles is a science fiction tale by the American writer Stanley G. Weinbaum (1935). The story starts from subjective idealism or immaterialism. The tale tells us about the invention of Professor Albert Ludwig, which allows the user to experiment with the world through glasses; a world with smell, taste and touch. The story does not develop linearly, independent of the viewer, but around it, interactively and represents the first literary record of what is now known as Virtual Reality.

Pygmalion's Spectacles by Stanley G. Weinbaum 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. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

The first study of Ovid, especially his Metamorphoses, as inherently visual literature, explaining his pervasive importance in our visual media.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.