Books tagged with: virtual world

Today we are all too familiar with the assault of digital information and various forms of media which work hard to blur the definition of reality. Robertson has created a world where that idea is pushed to its disturbing conclusion. On the Station, where the remnants of humanity orbit a toxic world...

Cronix starts off with the old and rather underplayed question of what happens when we’re able to upload our minds into virtual reality, and everyone wanders off into imaginary fairylands. As I’ve personally spent many days in a gaming induced haze punctuated by sporadic breaks for work or food, I’v...

Diaspora is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. About a thousand years in our future an entity is born. Not of man and woman , but as an orphan of Konishi Polis. A Polis is a virtual reality society, where a group of computerbased intelligences are living. There are several P...

Released in 1984, Neuromancer was one of those rare moments that broke the mold, pretty much inventing the notion of cyberspace and beginning the genre of the cyberpunk novel. It's been many years since I first read this book and I am re-visiting it here as part of my desire to read all the Hugo awa...

Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale is a hard science fiction novel, the debut of Leonid Korogodski. Before I begin the review it's worth noting a few things to put this literay achievement into some perspective. Pink Noise is the first novel to be written by Leonid Korogodski, a native Ukrainian who gaine...

The smash hit science fiction debut from Cline in 2011, Ready Player One has been written about and reviewed many times since. What more can we say here at SFBook? Cline’s story is a first person narrative that describes a new virtual utopia woven out of eighties culture. The real world socio-econom...

Richard is a Level 5 Artificial Intelligence and a Private Eye, his partner a German ex military cyborg named Klein. Their newest case takes them on the hunt for a killer who has jumped realities, hiding in the artificial construct of Reality 36. Unless Richard and Klein can stop him his powers coul...

Realtime Interrupt is a science fiction novel by James P Hogan. This book has a theme somewhat similar to Permutation City by Greg Egan - Again it's about VR and how far it can be taken. Hogan does a nice job of it, but I wasn't as fascinated by Realtime Interrupt as I was with Permutation City. The...

Snow crash is an acclaimed speculative fiction novel by the award winning author Neal Stephenson. Never getting into the Cyberpunk thing and hating the much-hyped use of the word Cyber, I've stayed away from everything that fell within the Cyberpunk category, with William Gibson as the centre of my...

The concluding part to the adventures of Jean Le Flambeur, The Causal Angel is a little confusing in its listing on various websites. Despite some titles to the contrary it is part three of the trilogy; where The Fractal Prince is part two and The Quantum Thief is part one. Admirers of Rajaniemi wil...

The Fractal Prince is the follow-up to the hit début novel The Quantum Thief that was released to a great deal of acclaim last year. Like the Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince follows two distinct threads, which while written in a vividly descriptive and disarming style offers a vision that is so di...

The Three-body Problem was originally written in Chinese by Liu Cixin. Launched to great acclaim within China, it became one of the most popular science fiction novels within the country and won the 2006 Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award. Thankfully it has now been translated by the talented auth...

By the pricking of her thumb follows on from The Real Time Murders published last year, but can be read as a stand-alone novel. Set in a future where almost everyone spends all their time in a virtual world, private investigator Alma is caught up in another impossible murder. She has been asked to i...

Computer Games used to be a child’s plaything, but as gamers grow older and are still playing this is no longer the case (if it ever was). As many gamers mature their reflexes deaden and will they one day even be able to pick up a conventional controller? Something like Virtual Reality may be the so...

If you read enough Near Future fiction you will start to see a trend. The future is not orange at all but bleak and a little depressing. It could be giant robots, aliens or the undead. There always seems to be something around the corner that is more dystopian  than utopian. I can take all the UFOs...

If you had the chance to start over again from an early age and know what you do now, would you take it? A chance to live your life again; buy those shares in Apple, know some of the exam questions and football results? The answer for me is no. 80 years more life is not worth risking my family. What...

I set a high bar set for science fiction short story collections that is in no way the fault of any modern author. Unfortunately for them I read The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury at an influential age. I rate a collection against the creepy science fiction/horror tones that Bradbury was able to cr...