One of the most intriguing forms of technology you can find in science fiction is virtual reality. Of course, VR headsets now exist in the real world, but fiction allows authors to unleash their imaginations in the virtual realm. They can create worlds upon worlds where their characters can fight battles, build lifelong friendships, and fall in love.
Virtual reality uses computer-generated imagery and hardware to trick someone’s brain into believing what they see is real, even though it isn’t. Some versions of virtual reality also involve sensors that can make characters feel the virtual world as well as see and hear it.
There are several books that delve into the idea of virtual reality and how it might affect society as a whole. Here are ten fantastic books that feature virtual reality.
1) Neuromancer by William Gibson
Case was once the most brilliant data-thief in the matrix until he messed with the wrong people and they crippled his nervous system, banishing him from cyberspace. Now he’s been recruited by a mysterious new employer for one last job—a run at an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence. With a dead man and Molly, a mirror-eyed street-samurai, along for the ride, Case is ready for this adventure.
This 1984 book is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. Even more impressively, it was sci-fi master William Gibson’s debut novel and one of the first to tackle virtual reality. He created a virtual reality dataspace called the “matrix” years before most people had even heard of the Internet. Neuromancer is the first entry in the author’s Sprawl trilogy.
2) Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
In Los Angeles, Hiro delivers pizza to mansions for a living, defending the pies from marauders with a matched set of samurai swords when necessary. He spends most of his time goggled into the Metaverse, where he is a warrior prince. But in the club The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being taken down by a strange new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and a vegetative state in real life). Hiro’s investigation into the Infocalypse leads him back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. Y.T., a brave teenaged skateboard courier, will join him on his quest. Together, they must race to stop a malevolent virtual villain bent on world domination.
Like Neuromancer, this 1992 novel’s spot-on take on virtual reality is incredibly impressive. It is credited with inspiring generations of Silicon Valley innovators who still marvel at the book’s prescient vision of what today’s tech landscape would look like. Snow Crash thins the line between virtual and physical reality in a fascinating way.
3) Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
By the year 2045, reality has become a bleak place. So most people, including Wade Watts, choose to spend the vast majority of their time jacked into OASIS, an expansive virtual world. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of puzzles based on his obsession with the pop culture of the past. Whoever solves them will inherit his immense fortune and control of the OASIS itself. When Wade cracks the first clue, he’s suddenly surrounded by rivals who would kill for this prize. The only way to survive is to win.
This book takes place almost entirely in the vibrant virtual world of the OASIS. The many different planets and games of the OASIS are incredibly imaginative and well-drawn. The technology used in the book is not too much further along than the VR technology we already have and makes one wonder how close we might be to this sort of future.
4) Daemon by Daniel Suarez
Daemons are computer programs that run in the background and wait for a particular event or time to execute. They power almost every service and make the networked world work, but they also make it vulnerable. A previously dormant daemon activates when legendary computer game architect Matthew Sobol’s obituary appears online, which sparks a chain of events that begins to unravel the interconnected world. This daemon reads news headlines, recruits human followers, and orders assassinations. With Sobol’s secrets buried with him, it’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to stop a self-replicating virtual killer before it realizes its ultimate purpose.
This New York Times bestselling high-tech thriller paints a very frightening picture of our future. It’s a chillingly plausible vision of what could happen if technology went awry. In the novel, there is a great deal of computer gameplay in virtual reality. The virtual world is fascinating and vividly detailed.
5) The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
During China’s Cultural Revolution, someone involved with a secret military project sends signals into space and ends up making contact with aliens. These aliens are on the brink of destruction and make plans to invade Earth. Back on Earth, people form into different camps—those who plan to welcome the superior beings and help them take over, and those who will fight against the invasion.
The Three-Body Problem recently came up in our list of the best alien-centric stories as well. This Hugo Award-winning book is just such a fantastic story, with an all-encompassing view of how such an impending invasion would affect society. In the novel, a virtual reality game plays a pivotal role in explaining the nature of the aliens’ planet and how certain members of society feel about them. This is the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, but the whole series is frequently referred to as Three-Body.
6) Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
One of the Intagliated, Lededje Y’breq has a marked body bearing witness to a family shame and belongs to a man with a great lust for power. She’s prepared to risk everything for her freedom but her release comes at a price. To put things right, she will have to help the Culture. Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone without being sure which side the Culture is really on. A war is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it’s about to erupt into reality.
Surface Detail is the eighth book in Iain Banks’ Culture series, but each book in the series is self-contained with new characters. This book features artificial afterlives (Heavens and Hells) that people are capable of creating with technology. There are some great virtual reality battle sequences and gut-wrenching depictions of the torment in the virtual Hells.
7) Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde
There are a ton of ways to get killed in the virtual reality game Heir Apparent, and Giannine seems to be finding them all. But she’s got to figure out a way to survive—because if she dies in the game, she’ll die for real.
This book is the second novel in the author’s Rasmussem Corporation series, but as with Surface Detail, this book stands on its own. The medieval fantasy atmosphere of Heir Apparent is delightful and Giannine’s race against the clock to win the game makes the story exciting. It’s also fun to watch Giannine improve her gameplay as the story goes on.
8) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Government agencies have started to breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers in order to defend the earth from a hostile alien race’s next attack. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, is drafted into the orbiting Battle School for military training. His skills make him a leader in school and earn him respect in the Battle Room, where the children engage in mock battles in zero gravity. But still, he suffers from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from adult teachers, and fear of the alien invaders. Could Ender be the perfect general Earth needs?
This novel won the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Like The Three-Body Problem, it is another novel that was also included in our list of alien-centric novels. It seems that when sci-fi writers are considering what the future might bring, quite a few think of both aliens and virtual reality technology. In Ender’s Game, the children at the Battle School run battle simulations in a shared virtual reality experience. With this 1985 novel, Orson Scott Card was able to predict how our current military uses virtual reality to train.
9) Permutation City by Greg Egan
Paul Durham keeps making Copies of himself—software simulations of his brain and body that can be run in virtual reality. He wants to use them as guinea pigs for a set of experiments but they keep changing their minds and shutting themselves down. Maria Deluca is an Autoverse addict who’s unemployed and almost out of money, but she can’t stop wasting her time playing around in this virtual world. Paul asks Maria to design a seed for an entire virtual biosphere able to exist inside the Autoverse, modeled down to the molecular level. The job will pay well and will allow her to indulge her obsession. But there has to be a catch since the seed would be useless without a simulation of the Autoverse large enough to allow the resulting biosphere to grow—a feat far beyond the capacity of all the computers in the world.
This novel takes place in the not-too-distant future and while we probably won’t achieve the level of VR displayed here by then, if we do, I hope those involved will use Greg Egan’s work as a guidebook to implementation. He has such a clear understanding of the technology he is writing about, it’s astounding. Permutation City also tackles some ethical questions we will have to consider as we spend more and more time in virtual reality.
10) Haven by Kate Seger
When the apocalypse happens, Lola Lovecraft is lucky enough to be able to escape into Haven, a virtual reality realm built for the purpose of saving humanity. But when Lola arrives, Haven doesn’t exactly seem like the perfect world that was promised. And if Lola wants to survive in this harsh world, she’ll have to go on a quest to find and defeat the ghost in the machine.
I’ve mentioned this story in a few of our other lists (like the ones of books and series with inventive magic systems and literary quests). It’s just too great not to include a list it was tailor-made for—one about books featuring virtual reality. Haven takes place on a virtual plane—one that, in a unique twist, is providing a literal haven for survivors of the apocalypse. This means that Lola can’t just quit the game when the going gets rough. You can read the first three chapters of this story for free on Fictionate, and the entire thing for just $0.99.
Soak Yourself in Fiction
Follow us on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Discord