Science Reality

Kat watched the Earth die at the hands of an alien intent on seeing the human race extinct. Determined to stop him at any cost, she risks all she has left to travel through time and space in order to save a world that’s already dead and to stop this killer before he can stop her.

In Step into the Metaverse, Dr. Mark van Rijmenam delivers a startlingly insightful discussion about how the world as we know it will fundamentally change as the physical and the digital worlds merge into the metaverse, impacting the everyday experiences of people, companies, and societies. The author maps out the extraordinary opportunities and challenges facing business leaders, consumers, regulators, policymakers, and other metaverse stakeholders trying to navigate the future of the Internet.

Second Lives takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass as Tim Guest investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the 21st century: virtual lives.

Details some of the many lives Michael has lived in his impossibly long life.

Those of you living through the next 30 years will become the most powerful creatures that have ever existed. You will have the opportunity and the duty to create a decidedly better world. Experience and maturity alone cannot provide the required wisdom fast enough. You will need to maximize your innate potential to accelerate wisdom. The Potentialist: Your Future in the New Reality of the Next Thirty Years explains the first steps to achieve your potential and accelerate wisdom. You will discover how forces of change create a New Reality by breaking down the one we know.

Trapped inside the game that they once loved, Iron Riot are now faced with a slow death by dehydration as their bodies in the real world are left to rot. The Masters, enigmatic creators of Strata, are willing to let anyone die so long as it preserves their perfect imaginary world. But there was one thing that they haven’t accounted for: A rat with a plan. If Iron Riot can finish the game before the timer runs out, defeat the Archdukes, beat the system, and show everyone what they are capable of, then they’ll have the attention of the whole world.

Called a “chronicler of a world on the move” by The New York Review of Books, Anna Badkhen seeks what separates and binds us at a time when one in seven people has left their birthplace, while a pandemic dictates the direst season of rupture in humankind’s remembering. Her new essay collection, Bright Unbearable Reality, comprises 11 essays set on four continents—roving everywhere from Oklahoma to Azerbaijan—and united by a common thread of communion and longing.

This is the optimistic story of our fraught relationship to universal consciousness, the domain that transcends every local mind. It is also the story of how reality is relative and changeable to the way each of us makes meaning. Truth, on the other hand, represents the permanent and timeless state of being beyond history and culture that is called nonlocal universal consciousness. This is the state of nonpersonal awareness within insight and eyesight.

Worried for his sanity after poor in-game choices, Grant Legate’s sister, Liz, blocks access to Continue Online. With no way around the restriction, he ventures into a new world—a VRMMO game based in space—called Advance Online. There he must help his companion AI, Hal Pal, overcome an identity crisis, race to the center of the universe to bring back his true love, and figure out where he stands on the scariest implication of all; AIs are bringing the dead to life.

Das Rennen um die Entwicklung einer superintelligenten Künstlichen Intelligenz hat begonnen. Und das Land, das gewinnt, wird den Globus beherrschen. Als Amerikas Programm zur Erschaffung einer mächtigen KI sabotiert wird, beginnt für den US-Agenten Cameron Carr eine verzweifelte Suche nach dem Schuldigen, wobei das Schicksal der Menschheit auf dem Spiel steht. In den richtigen Händen könnte eine solche KI die Zivilisation in ungeahnte Höhen führen. Aber in den falschen Händen könnte diese Technologie die größte Bedrohung darstellen, die die Menschheit je gesehen hat.

On Being Unreasonable mounts a vital and spirited defence of why and how being unreasonable can help improve the world. It examines and parses the pros and cons of our rules around reason, but leaves us with the rousing question: What if behaving unreasonably at times might be the best way to bring about meaningful change that is long overdue?

Bullied at school and home, Ash finds respite from his unhappy life in virtual reality games. One night, he spends his meager savings to help a stranger, who thanks him with a copy of an old fantasy game called The Glass Realm. While exploring the game, Ash meets a seemingly humble shopkeeper named Ruby. But from the start, Ruby seems different than the other townsfolk-especially when she and Ash stumble across an in-game quest designed not for the player, but for Ruby to solve.

Louis Parker is the divorced father of two teenagers who is still trying to find his life's purpose. After losing his job, Louie' financial situation convinces him he has nothing to lose if he agrees to test out a radical new virtual reality video game for a substantial fee. But Louie quickly learns that virtual reality is a lot more complicated than he realized. By the end of his seven days, is Louie trapped in virtual reality forever? If he is able to return to his own reality, is it the same one he started from, or has it immeasurably changed.

What would you do if you discovered an alternate reality in which you are a wanted criminal?Erica’s life takes a sudden and unexpected turn when a deja vu from a recurring dream saves her from a fatal accident. She is whisked away by someone claiming to be from a parallel universe, sent to protect her from a fugitive who has escaped from their reality to hunt her down. That fugitive is her.

The author of The Internet of Things presents his latest book.

Braving Britannia is an oral history of the groundbreaking PC video game, Ultima Online, which launched in 1997 and still operates today. The audiobook features interviews with players as they share how the game affected their lives. In a fantasy world of limitless potential, the only thing players seem to enjoy more than playing the game is talking about it, and yet, the true stories behind the avatars have largely gone unpublished for the past 20 years. Until now.

What if everything you've ever known—every thought, every emotion, every moment—was part of a simulation? Once dismissed as science fiction, the Simulation Hypothesis has surged into mainstream discussion, embraced by philosophers, physicists, and tech visionaries alike. As computing power soars and virtual realities grow more immersive, the idea that our universe might itself be a simulation becomes less absurd—and more plausible. But if we are in a simulation, the next question is both thrilling and unsettling: Who—or what—is running it? And why?

Is your baby defective or evolved? A dangerous secret lurks beneath the innocent faces of newborn babies. Hope Kerman is one of the first children to be born of The Third Gender, a birth defect that turns young adults into human parasites. Thriving by absorbing memories, knowledge, and experience from their victims, the Third Gender is quickly gaining power. Hope fights her natural urge to feed on others, but it's a battle she might not win. Ben Ziegler is a flawed FBI agent, determined to stop the Third Gender's rapid rise to power.

Why live, when dying brings you straight to heaven? The mysterious tech firm Broumgard pioneers a new form of virtual reality that mirrors, even exceeds, real life. Before long, people are dying to escape their humdrum lives for the virtual ecstasy of the Lobby. Literally. When the world discovers that dying while connected to the Lobby might mean an eternity in virtual heaven, people are willing to do anything to get inside.

Digitally reincarnated into the world's most powerful online video game, Clay must now find out what's happening on the outside to save those living in his world. On top of this, he's been pushed into a quest by a young paranoid king, nations are preparing for war, and a malevolent glitch continues its path of destruction.