Virtual Reality Fiction

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.

Braving Britannia is an oral history of the groundbreaking PC video game, Ultima Online, which launched in 1997 and still operates today. The audiobook features interviews with players as they share how the game affected their lives. In a fantasy world of limitless potential, the only thing players seem to enjoy more than playing the game is talking about it, and yet, the true stories behind the avatars have largely gone unpublished for the past 20 years. Until now.

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.

When you’re named after a 250-year-old tortoise, you grow up believing life is full of possibilities and wonder. But ever since Addie’s family got turned upside down, those things have been harder for her to see. The last thing Addie wants to do is make a new friend, but when her dad’s summer job takes them across the country, she meets Mateo and finds herself caught up in an exciting project. With the help of a virtual reality headset, she’s suddenly scaling castle walls, dodging angry kittens, and seeing the world in whole new ways.

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.

Trapped inside the game that they once loved, Iron Riot are now faced with a slow death by dehydration as their bodies in the real world are left to rot. The Masters, enigmatic creators of Strata, are willing to let anyone die so long as it preserves their perfect imaginary world. But there was one thing that they haven’t accounted for: A rat with a plan. If Iron Riot can finish the game before the timer runs out, defeat the Archdukes, beat the system, and show everyone what they are capable of, then they’ll have the attention of the whole world.

Lara Crane is stuck in her mind, in an indefinite stream of timelines where her life is perfect, just the way she wants it to be. But it's not real. It's all made up to give those who want to use time travel for their own personal ambitions. To give time to finish their experiments and turn Lara into a deadly time travel assassin.

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.

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.

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.

Can an apprentice Huntress, a grizzled veteran, a lone sorceress, and a tech witch find a way to stop a newer, even greater evil? As Quinn finds her way with her new abilities, she and her new clan continue their work to counter the efforts of demons bent on invading our world. Caught in an epic battle between the light and the dark as old as time, the Huntress and her team may only have one chance to save those she's sworn to protect. Will it be enough? Join Quinn and her friends as she continues to learn and explore what it means to be the Huntress.

The familiar world collapsed overnight. As the Transformation progressed, disasters occurred throughout the Earth. Materials changed their properties, new species of flora and fauna appeared. The Game converted our world into a huge dungeon, completely replacing the previous civilization. However, the alien plans for Earth began to go awry from the very beginning. The conversion was less successful than expected. An ordinary young man stole the bonus for the first gaming action, depriving the invaders of their perk.

Jerrell Hawkins has a plan. He’s going to marry Nadine Hartwell, study magic at University, and serve his kingdom in the ongoing war in the prestigious Orichalcum Company led by the hero of the realm. To do this, he needs to obtain a Class. When his plan to create a new, powerful spellcasting class fails, he fears all is lost. Then an enemy sleeper agent burns down his world and Nadine is infected with lycanthropy.

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.

A top-secret experiment at a restricted virtual-reality compound pulls attorney Tommy Diaz back into the orbit of Irene Adler, an old friend with an eidetic memory, a love of true-crime podcasts, and a knack for solving the unsolvable. But this? At a remote warehouse, a VR trial goes awry when a willing test subject, alone in the observation room, drops dead of anaphylaxis—from the sting of a virtual bee.

Sie jagt einen Serienkiller... und seine Gedanken nehmen Besitz von ihr. Sein Opferprofil: Heilige & Hure. Sein Tatort: London, jeden Februar. Sein Aufenthaltsort: ein Hochsicherheitsgefängnis... Oder? Wieder ist es Februar. Wieder wird eine brutal entstellte Leiche gefunden. Neuropsychologin Kyra Sullivan erkennt Parallelen zu den Taten des Februar-Killers, dem vor 14 Jahren ihre Schwester zum Opfer fiel. Sie fürchtet, dass es bald ein zweites Opfer geben wird und der Falsche hinter Gittern sitzt.