The Big Ball of Wax: A Novel of Tomorrow’s Happy World by Shepherd Mead. Here’s the cover of the Ballantine Books mass-market paperback I read back in the day. It’s now available on Kindle.

That’s the subtitle of Shepherd Mead‘s 1954 novel, The Big Ball of Wax.

Do you wonder – perhaps with trepidation and creeping anxiety – what the socioeconomic impacts of Virtual Reality (VR) might be?

Well, author Mead did that with painful humor back in 1954, before the maestro of Meta was even an embryo. Now that some are betting the high-tech farm on VR, perhaps we’d do well to take another look at this crusty tale.

It describes an invention that is See-Hear-Taste-Smell-Touch-o-Vision. Spoiler alert: Formerly thoughtful people check into cheap hotel rooms with no change of clothes and a bushel bag of uncooked rice, never to be heard from again.

Rehearsing brain surgery by VR seems like a sensible idea. But – wondering where your friends (or your kids) are because they’ve disappeared into an illusory fifth dimension?

Mead was also the author of another more popular cautionary tale – How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I suspect some tech tyros are also unknowingly following that example, as well.