Books with author Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

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.

We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive classic literature collection. This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts, We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. Also 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. We use state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.In 1935 American science fiction writer Stanley G.WeinbaumOffsite Link presented a comprehensive and specific fictional model for virtual reality in his short story Pygmalion's SpectaclesOffsite Link. In the story, the main character, Dan Burke, met an elfin professor, Albert Ludwig, who invented a pair of goggles which enabled "a movie that gives one sight and sound [...] taste, smell, and touch. [...] You are in the story, you speak to the shadows (characters) and they reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it."

The Adaptive Ultimate is a science fiction short story about an experimental medical treatment gone awry. Dr. Daniel Scott approaches his colleague, Dr. Herman Bach of Grand Mercy Hospital, looking for a human test subject. Scott claims that recovering from a disease or injury is merely a matter of adaptation. He has derived a serum from fruit flies, the most adaptable creatures he could find. Bach is skeptical, but has a patient only hours from death due to tuberculosis. With nothing to lose, a drab, plain woman named Kyra Zelas agrees to the treatment. The results are beyond Scott's wildest dreams. Within a week, Zelas is well and is discharged from the hospital. Shortly afterwards, she murders an old man in a park for his money...

"The Mad Moon" is a science fiction short story by Stanley G. Weinbaum. It's the 22nd century and protagonist Grant Calthorpe is a former sport-hunter collecting ferva leaves for the Neilan Drug Company, living near the Idiots' Hills with a parcat named Oliver. To evade stinging palms in the Ionan jungle, he rewards loonies with chocolate to collect the ferva leaves for him. One day, suffering the native "white fever" and its "attendant hallucinations", Calthorpe follows Oliver to Lee Neilan, daughter of the owner of Neilan Drug, also affected by the fever...

"IDIOTS!" howled Grant Calthorpe. "Fools—nitwits—imbeciles!" He sought wildly for some more expressive terms, failed and vented his exasperation in a vicious kick at the pile of rubbish on the ground. Too vicious a kick, in fact; he had again forgotten the one-third normal gravitation of Io, and his whole body followed his kick in a long, twelve-foot arc. As he struck the ground the four loonies giggled. Their great, idiotic heads, looking like nothing so much as the comic faces painted on Sunday balloons for children, swayed in unison on their five-foot necks, as thin as Grant's wrist. "Get out!" he blazed, scrambling erect. "Beat it, skiddoo, scram! No chocolate. No candy. Not until you learn that I want ferva leaves, and not any junk you happen to grab. Clear out!" The loonies— Lunae Jovis Magnicapites, or literally, Bigheads of Jupiter's Moon—backed away, giggling plaintively. Beyond doubt, they considered Grant fully as idiotic as he considered them, and were quite unable to understand the reasons for his anger. But they certainly realized that no candy was to be forthcoming, and their giggles took on a note of keen disappointment.So keen, indeed, that the leader, after twisting his ridiculous blue face in an imbecilic grin at Grant, voiced a last wild giggle and dashed his head against a glittering stone-bark tree. His companions casually picked up his body and moved off, with his head dragging behind them on its neck like a prisoner's ball on a chain.Grant brushed his hand across his forehead and turned wearily toward his stone-bark log shack. A pair of tiny, glittering red eyes caught his attention, and a slinker—Mus Sapiens—skipped his six-inch form across the threshold, bearing under his tiny, skinny arm what looked very much like Grant's clinical thermometer.Grant yelled angrily at the creature, seized a stone, and flung it vainly. At the edge of the brush, the slinker turned its ratlike, semihuman face toward him, squeaked its thin gibberish, shook a microscopic fist in manlike wrath, and vanished, its batlike cowl of skin fluttering like a cloak. It looked, indeed, very much like a black rat wearing a cape.It had been a mistake, Grant knew, to throw the stone at it. Now the tiny fiends would never permit him any peace, and their diminutive size and pseudo-human intelligence made them infernally troublesome as enemies. Yet, neither that reflection nor the loony's suicide troubled him particularly; he had witnessed instances like the latter too often, and besides, his head felt as if he were in for another siege of white fever.

When a party of slinkers undermines his shack, Calthorpe and Neilan flee into the Idiots' Hills, hoping the slinkers cannot follow them into the rarefied atmosphere. In a narrow valley between two peaks, they find a deserted city, apparently built by more-civilized previous generations of loonies. When opposed by the modern loonies, the slinkers form a narrow, dense mob, which Calthorpe destroys with a "flame pistol". This attracts Lee Neilan's father Gustavus, himself in search of her, and effects reunion. In gratitude to Calthorpe for saving his daughter, Gustavus offers him charge of a ferva plantation near Junopolis; whereupon Lee proposes her own marriage to Calthorpe.

When a party of slinkers undermines his shack, Calthorpe and Neilan flee into the Idiots' Hills, hoping the slinkers cannot follow them into the rarefied atmosphere. In a narrow valley between two peaks, they find a deserted city, apparently built by more-civilized previous generations of loonies. When opposed by the modern loonies, the slinkers form a narrow, dense mob, which Calthorpe destroys with a "flame pistol". This attracts Lee Neilan's father Gustavus, himself in search of her, and effects reunion. In gratitude to Calthorpe for saving his daughter, Gustavus offers him charge of a ferva plantation near Junopolis; whereupon Lee proposes her own marriage to Calthorpe.

When a party of slinkers undermines his shack, Calthorpe and Neilan flee into the Idiots' Hills, hoping the slinkers cannot follow them into the rarefied atmosphere. In a narrow valley between two peaks, they find a deserted city, apparently built by more-civilized previous generations of loonies. When opposed by the modern loonies, the slinkers form a narrow, dense mob, which Calthorpe destroys with a "flame pistol". This attracts Lee Neilan's father Gustavus, himself in search of her, and effects reunion. In gratitude to Calthorpe for saving his daughter, Gustavus offers him charge of a ferva plantation near Junopolis; whereupon Lee proposes her own marriage to Calthorpe.

A four-man crew crash lands on Mars, and Dick Jarvis, who sets out on his own meets Tweel, a sympathetic creature who shows him the ways of the planet. A strange pyramid building creature, a tentacled ‘dream beast’, and broken record cart people. Check out for yourself why A Martian Odyssey came in 2nd in the best science fiction stories of all time, right behind Asimov’s Nightfall. This short story set the career of Stanley Weinbaum off like a bomb, since he wrote a story like none had done before: it was about an alien who is sentient and intelligent rather than a mindless barbarian. He also added the twist that despite the creature’s intelligence, it didn’t have human logic or reason. It was followed four months later by a sequel, Valley of Dreams.