"Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of...

While playing a total immersion virtual reality game of kings and intrigue, fourteen-year-old Giannine learns that demonstrators have damaged the equipment to which she is connected, and she must win the game quickly or be damaged herself.

"Eliza McKay is an Extractionist: an expert in the virtual reality space where people's minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky--it's McKay's job to quietly extract them. And McKay's job just got a lot more dangerous. After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try to hack her cybernetic implants directly....

"Sura Neelin is on the run from her creditors, from her past, and her fathers murderers. She can't get a job, she can't get a place to live, she can't even walk down the street: the total surveillance society that is mid-21st century America means that every camera and every pair of smart glasses is her enemy. But Sura might have a chance in the alternate reality of the games. People can disappear in the LARP game worlds, into the alternate economy...

"Peter is terrified--aware of his losing battle with Alzheimer's and unable to communicate with his loved ones gathered around him. While they fight over what is to be done with him--nursing home or home care--he grapples with the deteriorating threads of memories distorted by time, fear, and the fragments of outside conversation he can manage to follow. Elsewhere, Johanna's employer takes possession of a fully autonomous, simulated universe she's...

"Michael and his friends, Sarah and Bryson, must stop the Mortality Doctrine and those behind it now as the fate of humanity is in the balance"--

"The inventive and hauntingly timely story of a seventeen-year-old coder's catapult to stardom, reminiscent of The Social Network with a Ready Player One twist. For seventeen-year-old Opal Hopper, code is magic. She can build entire worlds from scratch -- shimmering lakes, Mars craters, any virtual experience her heart desires. But she can't code her dad back into her life. When he disappeared after her tenth birthday, leaving only a cryptic note,...

21st century Tokyo, after the millennial quake. Neon rain. Light everywhere blowing under any door you might try to close. Where the New Buildings, the largest in the world, erect themselves unaided, their slow rippling movements like the contractions of a sea-creature . . . Colin Laney is here looking for work. He is an intuitive fisher for patterns of information, the "signature" an individual creates simply by going about the business of living....

In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers race to complete the Cavern, an empty white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn Mediterranean city, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in another empty white room. What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common,...