The Chamber of Life

Wertenbaker, G[reen] Peyton.[1] "The Chamber of Life."[2] Amazing Stories (October 1929). Reprint Amazing Stories (July 1962). For other reprints, see the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, linked at note as of August 2021.[3] And as of August 2021 available in electronic formats from Project Gutenberg as "'Chamber of Life' by Green Peyton.[4][5]

The on-line Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that "'The Chamber of Life' [...] presaged Virtual Reality,"[6] a point made with more detail by John J. Pierce in an e-note to the SFRA ListServ 27 April 2021.

In Wertenbaker’s story, a man named Barrett awakens in a lake, with no idea how he got there. But he has a recollection of having met an eccentric physicist named Melbourne, and having shared with him the idea for the ultimate motion picture. Only when he gets home, he discovers that he has grown a beard, and that his appearance has changed. And then he remembers an idyll in a futuristic utopia that seems to have lasted for two months. He sees wonders, and falls in love – but that world has no place for him, and he is ordered to leave. Only it was all a virtual reality dream. Melbourne, it turns out, has pursued that technology for many years, and finally succeeded[.]

Pierce gives the crucial quotation from Melbourne on his — as we'd call it — VR technology: "'I have created a means of reproducing all the sensations that a man would have in actual living: all the sounds, the odors, the little feelings that are half-realized in everyday life. The Chamber takes [possession] of you and lives for you. You forget your name, your very existence in this world, and you are taken into a fictitious world. It is like actually living the books you read today, or the motion pictures and plays you watch and hear.'"[7]

Cf. and contrast Fletcher Pratt and Laurence Manning’s "The City of the Living Dead," the sagas of A. C. Clarke's The City and the Stars and the feelies in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World — plus the large use of VR in later works we have cited[8] (and the many we have undoubtedly missed). Pierce notes that the VR is so real "that Barrett ages two months in just a day"; hence there is a suggestion of "the land of the lotus eaters" from Greek myth[9] — and a rather dark undertone of loss of control and technological possession.

RDE, with thanks to JJ Pierce, finishing, 7Aug21