"U., a 'corporate anthropologist,' is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless,...

"John Chu is a 'sherpa' - a paid guide to online role-playing games like the popular Call to Wizardry. For a fee, he and his crew will provide you with a top-flight character equipped with the best weapons and armor, and take you dragon-slaying in the Realms of Asgarth, hunting rogue starships in the Alpha Sector, or battling hordes of undead in the zombie apocalypse. Chu's new client, the pseudonymous Mr. Jones, claims to be a "wealthy, famous person"...

"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....

An advertising executive in Santiago, Chile, is grappling with a midlife crisis when he begins to experience inexplicable episodes of amnesia. Hoping to outrace this dilemma, he plans to travel abroad for a year and chart the second half of his life. Instead, he will journey into an unexpected, and very foreign territory, one where the boundary between the self and the other becomes dangerously interchangeable, as he appears to inhabit the lives of...

Don't believe everything you think. Kenna Ward is a "lifeguard for the brain," an envoy for Virtu-Tech, the preeminent virtual reality provider whose implants allow consumers to experience exhilarating imagined adventures-all while remaining perfectly safe. Most of the time, that is. In the rare instance when a participant mistakes an overwhelming situation as real, it's up to Ward to enter their scenario and pull them back to reality. But when...

Simon would have done anything to save his best friend after a mysterious accident almost killed her--including follow her into a virtual world. And what he and Kat discovered there was more terrifying than they could have ever imagined. Unwitting hospital patients are being forced to test a device that lets VR be experienced with all five senses. The technology is so advanced that it's deadly. Now the world's biggest tech corporation is hunting...

The buildings grow. And the city expands. And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally. Or perhaps they've always behaved that way, and it's normality that's at fault. And the king of the land confers with his best friend, who happens to be his closest advisor, who also happens to be a talking cat. But that's all perfectly natural and not at all weird. Iona, close to retirement, finds that the world she has always known is nothing...

"The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination. London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks....

"It should've been the greatest day in David's life. A trip to New York, wife by his side, to visit his new publisher. Finally it looks as though the gods of fate are going to lift him from schoolteacher to writer. But on his way back to Penn Station, a chance encounter changes all of that. David bumps into a stranger who covertly follows him, and then, just before they board the train home, passes him by close enough to whisper: "Remember me." The...

Isobel is the Queen of the medieval rave-themed VR game Sparkle Dungeon. Her prowess in the game makes her an ideal candidate to learn the secrets of "power morphemes"—unnaturally dense units of meaning that warp perception when skilfully pronounced. But Isobel’s reputation makes her the target of a strange resistance movement led by spellcasting anarchists, who may be the only thing stopping the cabal from toppling California over the edge of...