The City of the Living Dead
Manning, Laurence, and Flectcher Pratt. "The City of the Living Dead." Science Wonder Stories 1.12 (May 1930). For reprints see the Internet Science Fiction Database, link operative as of August 2021.[1]
Described by Sargent (1988; q.v. at link or under Reference) as a world where people dream inside machines, and "The human race degenerates." Cf. and contrast E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," R. Matheson, "The Waker Dreams." A. C. Clarke's Lion of Comarre, and W. Hjortsberg's "Gray Matters" — all listed under Fiction; note attack on machine dependence in Maning's The Man Who Awoke stories (Wonder Stories, 1933, coll. 1975), also cited by Sargent (1988).
In an e-note to the SFRA ListServ on 27 April 2021, John J. Pierce notes a cyborg character running the system and offers a longer description of the Virtual Reality technology and VR motif.
In a distant future where machines take care of all human needs, a man hired to supply new thrills to a group of tourists manages to convince each of them that one of the others is out to kill him – and three of them are indeed killed by mistake. But in a world where there is nothing to do – war is obsolete, but so are the arts like music and the theater – people embrace the idea, hiring others to “involve them in wild and impossible, often bloody, adventures.”
Only, scientists have figured out how to take the risk out of such adventures by improving the technology of mechanized theaters, then wiring people up to experience the sights, sounds and other sensations of pure fantasy. Advances in medical technology have already produced artificial eyes and other organs, and so the time has come for the next step.
Cf. and contrast a story Pierce discussed in the same e-note, "The Chamber of Life" (1929);[2] for machines taking over human needs, see also Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" and the following "Humanoids" novels.
RDE, title, 6Aug19; expanded with thanks to J.J. Pierce, 7Aug21