Looking for title of old SciFi story.

[boriz]

This has been playing on my mind. Please could anyone help me identify this story?

 

I used to read a lot of compendiums. This was probably a short story. Read around 1980-ish. No idea when it was published.

 

It begins with this guy seeing an ad in the newspaper about 'happiness guaranteed' or something like that. All you need to do it sign over everything you own, and they will put you into some sort of sarcophagus that keeps your body alive while you live in an idealised/customised VR world. He goes off-world I think, then years later returns to earth to find it deserted, like last man on earth stuff. Eventually he breaks into a building and finds that everyone has taken up this happiness offer and the whole planet is just people in these sarcophagi.

 

Ring a bell?

[FleshJeb]

I'm a big fan of compendiums myself. The trouble being that a lot of stuff tends to blend together in the mind, especially the relatively narrow-scope thought-experiments.

It definitely sounds familiar, but it could have been done by any number of the transitional Golden Age to New wave authors. Although https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheMachineStops was written in 1909, but it's kind of the inverse of the story you're thinking of.

Under the Literature folder on all of these:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LotusEaterMachine

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GettingSmiliesPaintedOnYourSoul

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TerminallyDependentSociety

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GhostPlanet

@JoeSchmuckatelli, a quest for you, because this is our kind of party.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 5/4/2023 at 5:22 PM, boriz said:

Ring a bell? 

I used to be a regular of 'Years Best' and other collections... And while similar to some I've read, nothing has quite all those pieces.

 

 

1 hour ago, FleshJeb said:

quest for you

- this seems later than 'golden age' especially since it's got the VR aspect. Brain jacking was the rage in the 70s. IIRC. 

When I get a chance I'll follow the links and see if it shakes anything loose 

OK. 

 

This is disturbing. 

 

Google 'Brain Jacking' - and let yourself fall into the rabbit hole a bit. 

Edited May 6, 2023 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[FleshJeb]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

VR

I assumed that this was descriptive rather than literal. Virtual worlds were posited earlier than the 70s.

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

When I get a chance I'll follow the links and see if it shakes anything loose 

Thanks. I dug for a couple hours on TVTropes and wikipedia (because I have a strange idea of fun), and couldn't nail it down.

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Brain Jacking

Oh no, what's this going to do to my search history?!?

Heheh. Yeah, I won't even get into a "self-driving" car, much less put a brain implant in.

Have a good one.

[boriz]

Thank you for your help. Followed those links. Very interesting, but no luck. I used VR as a shortcut for Virtual World. This story was almost certainly pre VR in the modern sense.

I had maybe a hundred SciFi anthologies. I inhaled them as a teenager. All were destroyed by damp after I moved out of the family home and they were put into cardboard boxes and stored in a garage.

I'm over 50 now, and I still miss my collection.