I’m reading Arthur C Clarke’s The City and the Stars, written in 1956, and it clearly has the holodeck concept. It actually goes Star Trek one better in that you can participate in it from home rather than go to some specific other location. But it has all the essentials"
- It is total sensory immersion. It can’t be distinguished from reality, except that
- The participant knows it’s not real and that it’s a game.
- Friends can join each other in a common adventure otherwise populated by computer-generated scenes and characters.
This is apparently a re-write of an even earlier Clarke book, Against the Fall of Night (1953), and I assume the same concept was in the earlier book as well.
Are there earlier examples?
Ray Bradbury did it in 1950, with The Veldt.
There’s “In the Imagicon” by George H. Smith, Galaxy Science Fiction, 1966.
“Day Million” by Frederik Pohl alludes to similar technology.
These both might be taken as “brain stimulation” sims rather than the “images enhanced with force fields” tech of the Holodeck, but the basic concept is pretty much the same.
Possibly not worth noting is the malfunctioning proto-holodeck that appeared in the Star Trek Animated Series episode “The Practical Joker” in 1974, 13 years before the live-action version of The Next Generation.
No need for TAS. There’s a holodeck in the original series. The fake Enterprise in The Mark Of Gideon is obviously a holodeck simulation. It isn’t spelled out, and a lot of people don’t get it, but it makes sense of the scene where Kirk looks out of a window and sees a crowd of people, then it changes to a panorama of stars.