I personally don’t agree with the dystopian vision of the metaverse presented by science fiction writers, but if you want to know where the inspiration for platforms like Second Life and OpenSim came from, these books are a must-read.
Plus, they might give you some tips on what to avoid as we get closer to a fully immersive future. At the bottom of this article, there’s one last bonus book on this list. It’s not about the metaverse, but it’s a must-have sci-fi classic that’s still as relevant today as it ever was.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
The paperback is usually $19, but today it’s $9.50. The hardcover is also on sale, down from $28 to $21.
The book won every science fiction award, helped create the cyberpunk genre, and paved the way for the way we think about space.
It’s a slightly dystopian vision of the future, but it’s a story worth revisiting, especially today when that future seems ever closer.
From the publisher:
Winner of the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Philip K. Dick Award Neuromancer is a classic science fiction masterpiece, considered one of the greatest visions of the future of the 20th century.
Neuromancer It was the first fully realized glimpse into humanity’s digital future, a shocking vision that challenged our assumptions about technology and ourselves, reshaped the way we speak and think, and changed the landscape of our imagination forever.
Buy the book here.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
And speaking of dystopian metaverse futures, this book started it all. And today, it’s 44% off. The paperback is just $10.70. And the deluxe hardcover edition is also 44% off, just $22.60.
I like his book The Diamond Age better, but that one is on sale today too. It’s 36% off, just $12.79.
But back to Snow Crash,
From the publisher:
Hiro lives in Los Angeles, where franchises line the freeways endlessly. The only escape from the sea of logos is a self-governing city-state where law-abiding citizens dare not leave their mansions.
Hiro delivers pizza to mansions for a living, and when necessary, he matches his samurai sword to defend his pies from looters. His home shares a 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time with his avatar in the legendary Metaverse, blindly.
But at a club called The Black Sun, fellow hackers are falling victim to a strange new drug called Snow Crash, which relegates them to a volatile cloud of bad digital karma (and, in the real world, a vegetative state).
Investigating the Infocalypse takes Hiro back to the origins of language itself, rooted in the ancient Sumerian priesthood. He is joined by YT, a fearless teenage skateboarding deliveryman. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain bent on world domination.
Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One
This paperback is 59% off, bringing the total price to just $7.35.
It’s a love poem about 1980s video games mixed with a Willy Wonka-style competition over who will run the metaverse.
I have a few complaints about this book and other books in the same genre. First of all, there are a lot of things that happen inside the game that shouldn’t happen. Just shut down the servers, people. Or just close the user accounts.
Second, the treasure hunt approach is a very bad way to plan for corporate succession.
Finally, why would a company dominate the metaverse if it’s not well-run? In the real world, competition appears almost immediately. Yes, Google dominates the search engine space. At least for now. But it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on websites. And while Second Life may be the big elephant in the social gaming realm, there are plenty of competitors, including big commercial players like Robox and Minecraft, all the MMOs, all the VR chat games, and open source like OpenSim.
If you read this book and the other cyberpunk novels on this list, please treat them as they were intended to be: as cautionary tales, not as how-to manuals! Please!
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Another classic from my childhood and a classic for many others. It’s an immersive game, not a virtual world. But how realistic is it?
The hardcover edition is now on sale for $10.49, down from $15.99.
From the publisher:
at The New York Times Bestselling author Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game―adapted into a film in 2013 starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford―is the Hugo- and Nebula-Award-winning classic science fiction novel about a young boy drawn into an interplanetary war.
To develop a safe defense against the next attack by a hostile alien race, government agencies raise child prodigies and train them to become soldiers.
Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, a brilliant boy, lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic older brother Peter, and his beloved younger sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the military training program, but failed. Young Ender is Wiggin, who is drafted into the Orbital Combat School for rigorous military training.
Ender’s skills make him a leader at school and he is respected in the Battle Room, where children fight mock battles in zero gravity. But growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers, Ender suffers greatly from isolation, competition from his peers, pressure from adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of alien invaders.
This is the first book in the six-volume Ender Sextet series. The other books are all on sale today, as well as Ender’s Shadow, the first of five books in the Shadow Saga series.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick
This book is not about the metaverse, but about AI, a topic that is becoming increasingly intertwined these days as AI is used to build worlds, script interactions, and animate characters within worlds.
And watching the announcements from OpenAI and Google AI this week, it seemed like their chatbots were getting more and more realistic.
Philip K. Dick predicted all this in 1968. Before I was born. Before the moon landing. Lyndon B. Johnson was still president. The Beatles were still together. Philip K. Dick predicted a lot of weird things. He was a pretty weird writer. I’m constantly amazed at how many of his stories have been made into big-budget movies.
Buy the book here.
Have you read these books? Do you own them?
Oh, and I almost forgot. I also wrote a book about the metaverse, but it wasn’t nearly as dystopian as this one.
And they’re not just for sale. They’re free. I’ve written over a dozen stories in the same universe, and I’m about to publish them, so this is your chance to catch up on the story so far.
Cream World Series
