Is there a Sci-Fi novel where people discover they live in simulated reality? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a Sci-Fi novel where people discover they live in simulated reality?

5 pointsgalaxyLogic8 comments

And in which further they are then able to establish communication with the creator of that simulated reality?

And then the creators of the simulated reality tell us that they have done the same thing, they too communicate with their creator. Then ...

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Greg Egan's Permutation City comes at this question from several angles simultaneously.

Major spoilers ahoy: That sounds similar to Simulacron-3 (which spawned the movies World on a Wire and The Thirteenth Floor) and Neal Stephenson's Fall (which implies that the Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, and REAMDE also take place in the same simulation).

Maybe: Redshirts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirts_(novel) I have not read it but maybe I will.

Time Out Of Joint [1] by Philip K. Dick -- from 1959! -- has the classic example of a character discovering he lives in a simulated reality. But it only has one level of simulation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Out_of_Joint

The cookie monster by Vernor Vinge is a nice short story:

https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...

So this reminded me of two possibilities:

I think this is most likely the one you means: https://qntm.org/responsibility

but this one may be a contender if not. https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2f1jfe/text_unreal/

From a literature POV this theme alone is very shallow for a decent story. Probably this is why it's not popular in sci-fi.

The only exciting to read literature experiment in this area I know of is this novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_(novel) which barely fits in sci-fi genre.

If that were the only plot then yes. But I assume there would be some interesting questions as to how similar or different the creators would be, what kind of physics they would have, how would "our" people react to the idea that there finally was proof of "God" who had crated us. And would that God be "good"?

Personally here's one trait I'd like to see in the book: The weirdness of quantum mechanics gets even weirder as we study it more. And that is the clue that many take to mean we probably live in simulated reality because simulated reality need not be logically consistent. So in the simulators' reality there would be no Quantum Mechanics, and physics would be much simpler. In our simulated reality it exists only as a clue to us that we live in a simulation. Or something like that.

Thanks for links to everybody, I didn't expect there to be so many books. I thought living in a simulated reality was a rather new idea. But Sci-Fi can see into the future.

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