Title	Author	Year	Remarks
Accelerando	Charles Stross	2005	A collection of related short stories, assembled as a novel, chronicling the life of a man and his daughter both pre and post-singularity.
The Algebraist	Iain M. Banks	2004	Posits a religion according to which 'The Truth' is that our universe is virtual.
Amnesia Moon	Jonathan Lethem	1995	On a road trip, two characters set out from a post-apocalypse Wyoming town and encounter a succession of alternate realities, including one shrouded in opaque green fog, another luck-based political system, and it is suggested that these divergent alternate realities emerged to obstruct an alien invasion of Earth. Homage to Philip K. Dick.
Breakfast of Champions	Kurt Vonnegut Jr.	1973	Kilgore Trout, an amateur science fiction writer, writes a story that mocks individualism by suggesting that there is only one human man and one God, and the rest of humanity are robots, made to test the man's reactions; hence, a kind of simulated reality.
Chronic City	Jonathan Lethem	2009	Several strands relating to virtual reality games and virtual objects, but then events in the "real world" lead the reader to conclude that the "real world" is a simulated reality which is accreting errors and anomalies.
The Circular Ruins	Jorge Luis Borges	1940	(not simulated reality, but subjective idealism/solipsism).
"The Cookie Monster"	Vernor Vinge	2004	The characters come to doubt their own reality. This story was reprinted in several anthology collections, won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Novella, and was nominated for the 2005 Nebula Award for Best Novella. One reviewer rated the story "A+" and praised "the central mysteries which Vinge so very skillfully unwraps for you over the course of the story itself."
Darwinia	Robert Charles Wilson	1998	An alternate reality spontaneously appears over a large portion of the Earth, covering most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In this alternate reality, evolution proceeded in an entirely different direction, so that the human race never existed. The rest of Earth is unaffected and presumably the people who had lived in the affected area vanished into non-existence.
Diaspora	Greg Egan	1997
Discourse on Method	René Descartes	1637
A Dream of Wessex	Christopher Priest	1977	Released in the United States under the title The Perfect Lover. A team of specialists undergoes a sort of computer-monitored group hypnosis to create an alternate England, hoping to improve their dystopian world, but their utopia is endangered by one member with foul emotions and megalomaniacal ideas.
The Dueling Machine	Ben Bova	1969
The Electric Ant	Philip K. Dick	1969
Electric Forest	Tanith Lee	1979
Epic	Conor Kostick	2004	The inhabitants of a whole world play in a virtual world for their real income and status.
Eternity	Greg Bear	1988	In particular, his introduction of the Taylor algorithms as a means of determining the simulated nature of an artificial environment.
Eye in the Sky	Philip K. Dick	1957	After a nuclear accident, seven victims successively pass a range of solipsist personalised alternate universes, including a geocentric, magic-based universe and a hardline marxist caricature of the contemporary United States. Tom Shippey wrote that it might be "a private fantasy world, watched over by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System."
Feersum Endjinn	Iain M. Banks	1994	Describes a version of Earth with very extensive virtual reality capabilities.
Flight: a Quantum Fiction novel	Vanna Bonta	1995	Posits that our universe is a virtual metaverse whereby collective and individual consciousness creates reality on the quantum level.
Forever Free	Joe Haldeman	1999
The Futurological Congress	Stanisław Lem	1971
Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality	Philip Zhai	1998	A philosophical speculation on the ontological status of the extreme form of virtual reality that combines with teleoperation, in comparison with what we perceive as the "actual" or "physical" reality. An array of thought experiments is constructed for the purpose of philosophical investigations.
The Girl Who Was Plugged In	James Tiptree Jr.	1974
Glasshouse	Charles Stross	2006
Halting State	Charles Stross	2007	The plot centers around a bank robbery in a virtual world.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	1979–2009	Earth was designed by an alien supercomputer called Deep Thought to find the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything (the Ultimate Answer already established as 42), using organic life as part of its operational matrix. However, early on in the first book Earth was destroyed just before the critical moment of read-out, leading to the events of the rest of the series. Later, part of the action takes place in a synthetic universe.
Idlewild	Nick Sagan	2003	This novel contains a simulated school inside a simulated world.
Illusions	Richard Bach	1977	A pilot on the Midwest summer barnstorming circuit meets a messiah who shows him that the world is merely "like a movie" designed by "the Master" to entertain and enlighten humanity.
Irreversible	Liz Maverick	2008	A young woman relives the most perfect week of her life over and over without being conscious of it, the subject of a corporate experiment to create and maintain a time loop. The week is totally manufactured, with actors hired to play friends and colleagues, medication designed to keep her tranquil, and an entire set of "stage hands" working to keep up the authenticity of the sets as they change for various occasions.
Loop	Koji Suzuki	1998
The Man in the High Castle	Philip K. Dick	1962	Initially, it appears that Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire won the Second World War in an alternate, occupied United States. However, the I Ching divinatory tool discloses this as an apparent illusion.
A Maze of Death	Philip K. Dick	1970
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect	Roger Williams	1994
Mona Lisa Overdrive	William Gibson	1988
Moongazer	Marianne Mancusi	2007	A post-apocalyptic underground society pacifies its citizens by plugging them into a simulated version of New York City before the war, meanwhile telling the people that they are actually traveling to an alternate reality where they can escape their constricted lives.
Neuromancer	William Gibson	1984	In this future, cyberspace has taken on the attributes of virtual reality.
Old Twentieth	Joe Haldeman	2005	A group of immortal humans sets off on a thousand year voyage to explore an Earth-type planet. To amuse themselves, they use virtual reality to take trips to the twentieth century; but when the trips start to go wrong, a virtual reality engineer discovers that the simulated world is ruled by a self-aware computer... who may be running a more complex simulation than they can ever imagine.
Otherland	Tad Williams	1998
Permutation City	Greg Egan	1994
"The Princess Ineffabelle"	Stanisław Lem	1965	A short story from The Cyberiad.
Ready Player One	Ernest Cline	2011	Set partially in a simulated reality named the OASIS.
The Reality Bug	D. J. MacHale	2003	Is set on a world destroyed by simulated reality.
Realtime Interrupt	James P. Hogan	1995	Is set in the near future, a cyber reality with its creator trapped inside.
REAMDE	Neal Stephenson	2011	Though not set within a simulated reality, the novel stars the creator of a hugely popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game and discusses many of the behind-the-scenes operations in its creation and success.
The Remnants series	K. A. Applegate	2001	Set on a ship that creates virtual landscapes
The Restoration Game	Ken MacLeod	2010	A mysterious anomaly leads to the revelation that the characters are living in a simulated world, which is in turn embedded within another simulated world.
"The Seventh Sally"	Stanisław Lem	1965	from the Cyberiad
Simulacron-3	Daniel F. Galouye	1964	Also published as Counterfeit World. Adapted as the film The Thirteenth Floor (1999).
Snow Crash	Neal Stephenson	1992	Romanticizing the perilous world of some young hackers, the novel discusses the history and nature of language and virtual reality, among many other topics.
Sophie's World	Jostein Gaarder	1991
Surface Detail	Iain M. Banks	2010	In which a civilization uses computer simulation and mind uploading to create and populate Hell.
They	Robert A. Heinlein	1941	A short story that focuses on a man who believes the universe was created to deceive him.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch	Philip K. Dick	1965	In this future, alternate states of consciousness are mediated by widespread and legal use of hallucinogens.
Time Out of Joint	Philip K. Dick	1959	Ragle Gumm is trapped within an artificial reality that resembles small town America in the late fifties. It is disclosed to be a strategic simulation run by a Terran government at war with its separatist lunar colony in 1998.
The Trouble with Bubbles	Philip K. Dick	1953
Ubik	Philip K. Dick	1969	Several former corporate employees are killed but their consciousnesses remain sentient, albeit decaying, in a simulated shared hallucinatory experience.
Valis	Philip K. Dick	1981	In this departure, it is our own world that is stated to be a hallucinatory overlay, produced from a gnostic demiurge that is malignant- although it may also be a visual and auditory hallucination produced by authorial schizophrenia
"The Veldt"	Ray Bradbury	1951	A short story from The Illustrated Man, this grim tale describes two children who prefer their simulated-reality nursery to their parents.
Vurt	Jeff Noon	1993
Pollen	Jeff Noon	1995
Automated Alice	Jeff Noon	1996
The Wonderland Gambit series	Jack L. Chalker	1995-1997	A trilogy that pays homage to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Words Made Flesh	Ramsey Dukes	1987
"You're Another"	Damon Knight	1955	This short story about a character who finds himself in a bizarre, perhaps movie-based reality was frequently reprinted, and was translated into French as "En Scène!".
Crystal Nights	Greg Egan		This short story is a tale of a group of scientists that create a simulation of a world to explore evolution and societal development. Eventually they reveal themselves to the inhabitants and are treated as gods, but then their creations realize there is more than meets the eye and plot their escape. Available here: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/

Simulated reality in fiction

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