More like The Problems with Polymorphing
but
- Richard Forthrast
series2 books2011
similar byvirtual realityvirtual world+2 more
Neal Stephenson's Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast novels open with Reamde, a globe-spanning thriller that starts when ransomware inside an MMORPG economy pulls Richard's extended family into a real-world hostage crisis involving hackers, jihadists and Russian mobsters. The sequel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell shifts registers entirely, following Richard's digitally preserved mind after death into an afterlife simulation built from his scanned brain. The two books share a protagonist and family but differ sharply in genre and scale.
- Rasmussem Corporation Games
series3 books1991
similar byvirtual realityvirtual worldnear future+1 more
Vivian Vande Velde's Rasmussem Corporation Games books each drop a different protagonist into a malfunctioning virtual-reality game built by the fictional Rasmussem company, where the usual escape routes stop working and the stakes turn unexpectedly real. User Unfriendly, Heir Apparent, and Deadly Pink share the same premise and company rather than a continuing cast or plot. Vande Velde, an American children's and YA author, wrote the three books more than two decades apart.
- Sprawl Trilogy
series10 books1981
similar byvirtual realitynear future
The Sprawl Trilogy is William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk sequence: Neuromancer (1984), in which hacker Case is drawn into a high-stakes heist alongside an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which widen the same near-future world of corporate power and networked cyberspace to new characters. Johnny Mnemonic, an early short story set in the same fictional milieu, predates the novels and introduces the courier Molly Millions before her role in the trilogy. Together these works established much of cyberpunk's visual and thematic vocabulary.
- Vurt
series4 books1993
similar by+3 more
In Jeff Noon's alternate Manchester, an entire subculture has formed around Vurt: a hallucinogenic, colour-coded feather that plunges users into a shared alternate reality as vivid and dangerous as real life. Vurt follows Scribble and his gang, the Stash Riders, on a search for his sister, lost somewhere inside a Vurt trip gone catastrophically wrong. The sequel Pollen continues directly from its fallout, while Noon's other novels of the period, including Automated Alice and Nymphomation, circle the same fevered, drug-soaked version of the city.
- Chronicles of the One
series3 books2017
similar byfantasynear future
Nora Roberts's trilogy opens after a pandemic has devastated the world and the survivors find that magic - "the uncanny" - has risen among the population, splitting society between those gifted with it and those who fear and hunt them down. Year One, Of Blood and Bone, and The Rise of Magicks follow a chosen young woman, Fallon Swift, as she is trained toward a confrontation with the story's dark power in a reordered, post-collapse world. It is a departure for Roberts into full post-apocalyptic fantasy rather than her usual contemporary settings.
- Patternist
series6 books1976
completed
The Patternist series is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."
- Space Demons
series4 books1986
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Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons follows a group of Australian schoolkids drawn into a mysterious video game that starts pulling them physically into its world, with consequences that follow them home. The story continues across two more novels, Skymaze and Shinkei, following the same characters into further games.
- Minecraft
universe207 books2014
Start hereThe Island · Start here
similar by+1 more
The sun is going down, and you have no walls. Somewhere in the dark a green thing is walking toward you on four stubby legs, and it does not stop and it does not speak, and when it reaches you it will hiss. So you dig. You punch wood from a tree, shape it into planks, stack the planks into a box just big enough to outlast the night — and in the morning the world is yours again, cubic and endless and waiting to be reshaped one block at a time. This is the Overworld: squared-off oceans, blocky hills, deep glittering mines, and beyond them the burning Nether and the floating void of the End, where everything can be broken down and built back into something else. The books that grow from it come in two very different sizes. On one shelf sits Mojang's own line — standalone novels like Max Brooks' tale of a castaway learning the island's rules the hard way, the monster-hunting Mob Squad, the illustrated Woodsword Chronicles, and rack on rack of official handbooks. Against it surges a whole cottage industry of unofficial "Minecrafter" fiction for young readers: the diary-comic misadventures of Diary of a Minecraft Zombie and The Creeper Diaries, Winter Morgan's brisk quest tales, and Mark Cheverton's Gameknight999 saga of a boy trapped inside the game. No single timeline binds them; each series keeps its own. What holds it together is not a plot but a place, and a feeling — the small triumph of surviving one more night, the itch to see past the next ridge, the freedom to build the thing you pictured. Newcomers wanting a story with a spine should start with Max Brooks' The Island, self-contained and quietly clever; younger readers chasing laughs can drop into Diary of a Minecraft Zombie or Woodsword Chronicles at book one. Beyond that, pick a mine and start digging.
- Ready Player One
series3 books2011
similar byvirtual realityvirtual worldnear future
Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011) is set in a near-future dystopia where much of humanity escapes into the OASIS, a vast virtual-reality universe, and follows teenager Wade Watts as he chases an Easter egg hidden by the OASIS's late creator in a puzzle-based hunt worth a fortune. The 2020 sequel, Ready Player Two, picks up after Wade has gained control of the OASIS and follows him and his friends into a new quest built around a brain-computer interface the creator left behind.
- Snow Crash
Neal Stephensonstandalone novel1992
similar byvirtual realitynear future+1 more
Snow Crash is a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.
- Borne
series3 books2017
similar bynear future+2 more
Borne is set in a ruined, biotech-poisoned city dominated by a giant flying bear named Mord, where a scavenger finds a strange organism she names Borne and raises it, only to discover it may be more dangerous - and more alive - than she expected. Jeff VanderMeer's series continues with the related novels The Strange Bird and Dead Astronauts, set in the same devastated world.
- Самый странный нуб / The Weirdest Noob
series3 books2014
similar byvirtual realityvirtual worldnear future
