Pygmalion's Spectacles

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.