The (fictional) dystopia
Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist’s rooting into VR’s more militaristic implications. In the novel, published in 2000, memory and imagination act as both prison and possibility—a VR researcher loses herself in the blank white of the virtual room she’s creating while, across the world, a prisoner of war is confined, alone, in another white room.
Plowing the Dark is not as explicitly about games as the other books on this list, but it’ll force you to consider what passion and technology help create in your life, whether it’s escapism, or something else.
