Virtual Reality Fantasy

Becoming a global celebrity overnight would make most people happy. Not Lynn Raven. As a teenage gaming prodigy, she’s enjoyed years of anonymity behind the virtual mask of Larry Coughlin, war-hardened vet and virtual gaming mercenary. But now Lynn has stepped out of the shadows to compete in the cutting-edge augmented reality game TransDimensional Hunter that has taken the world by storm. And she’s winning. But with success has come swarms of paparazzi drones, jealous teammates, and a backstabbing rival team that will use any trick in the book to ruin her.

A decade has passed since the city of Pittsburgh was reduced to ash. While the rest of the world has moved on, losing itself in the noise of a media-glutted future, survivor John Dominic Blaxton remains obsessed with the past. Grieving for his wife and unborn child who perished in the blast, Dominic relives his lost life by immersing in the Archive - a fully interactive digital reconstruction of Pittsburgh, accessible to anyone who wants to visit the places they remember and the people they loved.

Carlos is dead. A soldier who died for his ideals a thousand years ago, he's been reincarnated and conscripted to fight an A.I. revolution in deep space. And he's not sure he's fighting for the right side. Seba is alive. By a fluke of nature, a contractual overlap, and a loop in its subroutines, this lunar mining robot has gained sentience. Gathering with other "freeboots", Seba is taking a stand against the corporations that want it and its kind gone.

Bullied at school and home, Ash finds respite from his unhappy life in virtual reality games. One night, he spends his meager savings to help a stranger, who thanks him with a copy of an old fantasy game called The Glass Realm. While exploring the game, Ash meets a seemingly humble shopkeeper named Ruby. But from the start, Ruby seems different than the other townsfolk-especially when she and Ash stumble across an in-game quest designed not for the player, but for Ruby to solve.

Two novellas set in Aliette de Bodard’s award-winning, critically acclaimed Xuya universe, a timeline where Asia became dominant, and where the space age has Confucian galactic empires of Vietnamese and Chinese inspiration. Contains The Citadel of Weeping Pearls and The Tea Master and the Detective.

The city of Neo Songdo is a Russian doll of realities. The smart city is designed to be read by machine vision while people see only the augmented facade of the corporate ideal. At night the stars are obscured by an intergalactic virtual war being waged by millions of players, while on the streets below people are forced to beg, steal, and hustle to survive. Enter Julius Dax, online repoman and real-life thief. He's been hired for a special job. But when he finds out he's stolen the first sentient AI, his payday gets a lot more complicated.

ZeitgeistIt's 1999 in Cyprus, an ancient island bejeweled with blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers and littered with rusting land mines, corroding barbed wire, and illegal sewage dumps. Here, in the Turkish half of the island, the ever-enterprising Leggy Starlitz has alighted, pausing on his mission to storm the Third World with the "G-7" girls, the cheapest, phoniest all-girl band ever to wear Wonderbras and spandex. And his market is staring him in the face.

Erin is a plastic girl living in a plastic world. Every day she eats a breakfast of boiled chicken, then conveys her articulated body to Tablet Town, where she sells other figurines Smartbodies: wearable tech that allows full, physical immersion in a virtual world, a refuge from real life’s brutal wars, oppressive governmental monitoring, and omnipresent eco-terrorist insurgency. If you cut her, she will not bleed—but she and her fellow figurines can still be cracked or blown apart by gunfire or bombs, or crumble away from nuclear fallout.

New Liberty City, 2134. Two corporations have replaced the US, splitting the country’s remaining forty-five states (five have been submerged under the ocean) between them: Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf. There are nine supercities within the continental US, and New Liberty City is the only amalgamated city split between the two megacorps, and thus at a perpetual state of civil war as the feeds broadcast the atrocities committed by each side.

Kali Ling has faced down death hundreds of times for the entertainment of millions. She knows fear - and she knows what's truly terrifying.... There's a new game in town. A brutal, winner-takes-all international video game tournament showcasing the world's most elite players, promising fame, prestige, and unbelievable fortune. But there's a catch. The game uses new VR pods guaranteed to push digital warriors to their physical and psychological brink - adapting every time a gamer makes a move.

Alexandra McInnes hat als Pilotin der Special Forces zahlreiche Einsätze erfolgreich geflogen. Doch bei einem verheerenden Unfall wird sie schwer verletzt. Der Kybernetiker Dr. Jensen eröffnet ihr die Möglichkeit, an einem einzigartigen Experiment teilzunehmen: Sie soll ihr Bewusstsein in das Online-Spiel Vorena übertragen und dort vollständig geheilt weiterleben. Als Alexandra die gigantische Welt Vorenas betritt, verändert dies alles. Fortan muss sie als Kämpferin Questen erfüllen, sich mit anderen Spielern verbünden und Reiche erobern.

Das Rennen um die Entwicklung einer superintelligenten Künstlichen Intelligenz hat begonnen. Und das Land, das gewinnt, wird den Globus beherrschen. Als Amerikas Programm zur Erschaffung einer mächtigen KI sabotiert wird, beginnt für den US-Agenten Cameron Carr eine verzweifelte Suche nach dem Schuldigen, wobei das Schicksal der Menschheit auf dem Spiel steht. In den richtigen Händen könnte eine solche KI die Zivilisation in ungeahnte Höhen führen. Aber in den falschen Händen könnte diese Technologie die größte Bedrohung darstellen, die die Menschheit je gesehen hat.

Why live, when dying brings you straight to heaven? The mysterious tech firm Broumgard pioneers a new form of virtual reality that mirrors, even exceeds, real life. Before long, people are dying to escape their humdrum lives for the virtual ecstasy of the Lobby. Literally. When the world discovers that dying while connected to the Lobby might mean an eternity in virtual heaven, people are willing to do anything to get inside.

Being a mercenary isn't all it's cracked up to be. Especially when Riko's hard-won reputation has taken a hard dive into f--ked. Now she's fair game for every Tom, Dick, and Blow looking to score some cred. In this city, credibility means everything - there's no room for excuses. She still doesn't know what she did to screw up so badly, and chasing every gone-cold lead is only making it worse. Without help and losing ground fast, Riko has a choice: break every rule of the street on her search for answers...or die trying.

Eure schöne neue Welt ist tödlich! Mit einem Schlag endet Vivians sorgenfreies Leben: Ihre Mutter Sofia wurde ermordet! Die erfolgreiche Game-Entwicklerin stand kurz vor dem Release eines bahnbrechenden Computerspiels. "White Maze" wird mit neuartigen Lucent-Kontaktlinsen gespielt - dank ihnen erleben die Spieler virtuelle Game-Welten mit allen Sinnen. Aber warum zerstörte Vivians Mutter kurz vor ihrem Tod die Prototypen der Linsen Zusammen mit dem schulbekannten Hacker Tom will Viv den Mord an Sofia aufklären. Dazu muss Viv selbst Lucent-Linsen einsetzen und tief in die virtuelle Welt eintauchen.

Overworld. It's more than just the world's most popular e-sport - for thousands of VR teams around the globe, Overworld is life. It means fame and fortune, or maybe it's a ticket out of obscurity or poverty. If you have a connection to the Internet and four friends you trust with your life, anything is possible.

Murph lives on an ocean liner which has been set down in the corn fields of Kansas. He works as a security op and plays dangerous games in a virtual reality called Way Out. But Murph is lonely and wants to meet his online lover, Cat, in person. But who is Cat, exactly, and what secret is she keeping from Murph?