The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (1965): Before there was virtual reality, Philip K. Dick spent a lot of time mulling over virtual reality in a wide variety of ways, from the machine-produced to the religiously derived concept of Maya, the physical world of illusion. Dick himself noted on more than one occasion that the two main concerns of his vast body of work seemed to be 'What is reality?' and 'What is a human being?', and this mid-1960's novel explores both issues on a number of levels.
Dick certainly didn't aim to predict the future; what increasingly disturbs in his work is his ability to predict the attitude of the future, our present. Various forms of mediated realities, dream-states, trance-states, and constructed environments play a part in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with the boundaries blurring between them throughout the novel.
Things on Earth and in Earth's colonies in the Solar System are pretty grim as the novel begins. Earth is getting hotter, to the extent that nobody goes outside unprotected during the day-time. Earth's colonies on various worlds and moons are such a grim slog that the United Nations forces people to relocate there -- and once there, almost all citizens quickly become addicted to the drug-enhanced game of Perky Pat, which I am not even going to try to explain at length here. It involves a virtual reality and a form of mind-sharing.
From Proxima Centauri returns the explorer Palmer Eldritch. And he's got a new drug. One that seems to promise an endless ability to reshape one's own past, perhaps in a virtual state, perhaps for real. But what does he get from this, other than money? A handful of people will try to find out, or possibly die trying. Or something.
It's a deceptively dense novel with a nicely defined group of protagonists, or antagonists, depending on the situation. Dick's wealth of invention is at full burn: the pervasive use of precognitive humans to predict what new products will sell is one such touch, and there are many others. It doesn't look like our future at all, except that it looks exactly like it. Highly recommended.
Night Monsters (1974) by Fritz Leiber containing the following stories: The Black Gondolier (1964); Midnight in the Mirror World (1964); I'm Looking for Jeff (1952); The Creature from Cleveland Depths (1962); The Oldest Soldier (1960); The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1949); and A Bit of the Dark World (1962) .
Leiber was probably the best writer of all those science-fiction and fantasy writers who collectively formed the 'Golden Age' of science fiction (basically, the 1940's) and went on to continue to define the genre(s) in the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, his cynical, often dystopic takes on the future in his 1950's and 1960's work make him more at home in the company of writers who came of age in those decades, when Leiber (born around 1910) was already middle-aged and older.
Leiber came from a theatre family, and while that isn't much of a factor here, it was in other stories. He also corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft in the 1930's. He wrote several Lovecraftian stories over the course of his career, some pastiches, some revisionist takes that explored what one could do with cosmic horror.
"The Black Gondolier" was written for an Arkham House anthology, and it pays homage to Lovecraft in structure (and concluding italics) while nonetheless situating the horror within Leiber's expert, long-time evocation of terrible horrors with new, modern incarnations and meanings. Here, that places a strange and creeping horror somewhere in or below California's Venice (Beach) in the early 1960's, that odd and rundown simulacrum of Italy's Venice, but with way more oil wells.
Leiber ranges far throughout this collection, which samples Leiber's dystopic, sarcastic science fiction ("The Creature of Cleveland Depths," which somehow manages to satirize the current culture of the Smartphone), and his grimy urban twists on traditional horror tropes (the Ghost in "I'm Looking for Jeff" and the Vampire in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes").
We also get cosmic horror that seems closer to Algernon Blackwood in "A Bit of the Dark World," all of it occurring in the sun-drenched hills above Los Angeles, a sort of cosmic Noonday Devil. Leiber's affection for mathematical problems and chess manifest in the oddly moving ghost story "Midnight in the Mirror World." Finally, we visit the time-spanning, reality-changing war of his Changewar series in "The Oldest Soldier," as the war between the time-travelling groups known as the Snakes and the Spiders wanders into a neighbourhood bar.
In all, this is a fairly representative sample of the breadth and depth of Leiber's decades of writing, with only his seminal and the career-long influence on sword and sorcery fiction being truly neglected. Highly recommended.
