Books tagged with: virtual reality

Cyberpunk has always concerned itself with the transformational relationship of man and machine. Times and technology changes, but the contemporary cyberpunk story is still concerned with this and Ada King by E. M. Faulds wholeheartedly embraces that essence whilst invoking new dystopian themes and...

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...

Cydonia is the second volume in the Web series of young adult fiction, written by Ken Mcleod. Some where out there there's a link to this page saying that I've reviewed everything MacLeod has published, which can't be true all the time, but I can do my best and review as much as I can find. Even if...

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...

Disaster Park is a science fiction novel by Mark Konkel. Imagine that you could experience the greatest (or worst) disasters in human history, be on board the Titanic as it leaves Southhampton docks on the 10th April 1912 or perhaps a visitor on the 92nd floor of the North Tower on that fateful day...

Entoverse is the fourth novel in the Giants series, written by James P Hogan. Having just finished The Giants Novels I thought my self lucky when I found the fourth (and for now final) giant novel Entoverse at my local book dealer. I had read a bit about it on the net and my expectations for it wher...

A title that gives a hint as to what we might expect, but ruins no surprises at all, Gemini Gambit by D. Scott Johnson is an intriguing story of the near future, immerses us in a world a generation or two further on from our own. Elite hacker ‘Angel Rage’ – whose real name is Kim Trayne has retired,...

Permutation City is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. Having liked Egans Quarantine, I was looking forward to reading this one and I was not disappointed. Again Egan has written a fantastic story by grabbing an idea and taking it to the limit. This time we are in a world wh...

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...

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...

Tech Heaven is a science fiction novel by Linda Nagata. This is Linda Nagata's second book and is in a lot of ways, a lot better than her first (The Bohr Maker(TBM)). It's easier to read, it has a better flow and it also has a lot more to say. At the same time I think that it has lost something when...

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 Cybernetic Walrus is a science fiction novel by the Jack L Chalker. On my version of this book the title contains the words Book One - which is, if you ask me, a good thing. All too often you have to read the fine print on the back of a book to find out that it's number one in a series - sometim...

The Guns of Mars is a science fiction novel by Martin T Ingham. Morgan Asher finds himself a reluctant Martian, part of the colonization effort so that his wife can fulfill her lifelong dream. It isn't long after arriving on the red planet that Morgan discovers a sinister plot by a group known as th...

The March Hare Network is a science fiction novel by Jack L Chalker and follows on from the events of The Cybernetic Walrus. I'm not happy with this book, it takes off where book one ends and goes on and on in the same track, with nothing really new happening. The strange thing is that Chalker actua...

From the back cover: The oil is gone. That way of life, ended. An invention frees the mind. A cyber-world becomes salvation. A boy, a weapon. A soldier, a titan. While nations thrash into antiquity, And a CEO becomes Queen, A man, brilliant and cunning, Plots to rule it all. Imagine a future where o...

The Sacred Protocol is a near future novel of an alternative history, written by Hylton H Smith. After the Spanish Armada defeat the English fleet in 1588 the great British Empire is overthrown and Spain control most of Europe. Moving forward to 2016 and the Internet collapses causing mass chaos as...

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...

Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? The Heroes (and it appears, Villians) of this fine city are being bumped off one and no-one seems to have any idea who could be carrying out this evil deed. Worse still there are supposed to be fail-safes to prevent any Cape (be they good or bad) from dying...

I found this book on Amazon while generally having a browse around and put it on my wish list for Christmas (yes, last Christmas). I finally got round to reading it, I'm glad I did! Shovel Ready is set in a near future New York that has suffered much since a dirty bomb hit Times Square and the refus...

Haunted Futures is a collection presenting the uncertain future in many guises. Originally funded as part of a kickstarter campaign and edited by Salome Jones it features short stories from authors including Warren Ellis, Jeff Noon, Tricia Sullivan and SL Huang (amongst others). The brief these auth...

One of the (many) things I like about Adam Robert's stories is that they are always full of big ideas and The Real-Town Murders is no exception. This time the author has written a future-noir crime story which revolves around the "locked room mystery". A popular subgenre in it's own right, "locked r...

Before Mars is the third book set within the authors Planetfall Universe. As the name suggests it's actually set before the events of Planetfall and After Atlas. After months of travel, Anna Kubrin finally arrives on the Red Planet to begin her job as geologist and in-residence artist. She already m...

We are told to live in the moment; don’t worry about the past or the future, it is now that you should care about, but how many of us really do? We spend endless hours checking our phones or having meaningless arguments online. If someone walked in on you right now and said that you are not actually...

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...

The average person seems to put a lot of trust in their Government. No way they are spying on me online and even if they are, what am I doing that they would care about? This attitude has shown that ignorance is not bliss, they may just sell your data to the highest bidder and before you know it the...

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...

The idea of a virtual reality  being  superior to  the real thing reoccurs  often  in  science fiction. Why live in the slums  of   Ready Player  One   or  the battleship grey halls of  Red Dwarf , when things can be Better Than Life? The issues arise  because  these  simulated  utopias always seem...

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...

Dystopian fiction has been becoming increasingly popular in recent years, probably because many of us can see the tell-tale signs of it coming along the tracks in real life. This is a depressing thought, but one worth exploring. How will humans continue to survive on a planet they are poisoning? Som...

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...

Science Fiction has been inspired by religion ever since it started being written, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus even has the Greek Gods in the title. The word science may be in the title of the genre, but it is also a genre about wonder, about questioning the things around us. Science fiction a...

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...