The Joy Makers

Gunn, James. The Joy Makers. USA: Bantam, 1961. UK: Gollancz, 1963. Fix-up of "Name Your Pleasure" (1955), "The Naked Sky" (1955), and "The Unhappy Man" (two novellas and a novelette, all 1955). See Internet Speculative Fiction Database for bibliographic details.[1]

Opening of discussion on the GoodReads site:

Imagine a world where you can have everything you want, or if you can't have it, you can be psychologically conditioned not to want it. Imagine a world so technologically advanced that happiness and contentment can be achieved without effort, a world where there is no sickness or hunger, no deprivation, no want, no striving, no disappointment. Imagine that any experience can be yours and any fantasy or desire reconstructed by machines and fed directly into your cerebral cortex. Imagine all this, and you have the world of James Gunn's The Joy Makers, a nightmare world of indolence, of lost purpose, of the death of civilization.[2]

Discussed briefly in Grech et al.'s "Sex in the Machine," p. 18, and mentioned by Grech, "Simulation Scenarios in the Star Trek Universe."

RDE, 26Jun21