Simulated reality in fiction

Simulated reality is a theme that pre-dates science fiction. In Medieval and Renaissance religious theatre, the concept of the world as theater is frequent. Works, early and contemporary, include:

Literature

Title	Author	Year	Remarks
Accelerando	Charles Stross	2005
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.
The Circular Ruins	Jorge Luis Borges	1940	(not simulated reality, but subjective idealism/solipsism).
The Cookie Monster	Vernor Vinge	2004
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
The Dueling Machine	Ben Bova	1969
Discourse on Method	René Descartes	1637
Electric Forest	Tanith Lee	1979
The Electric Ant	Philip K. Dick	1969
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 (novel)	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
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
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
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.
Mona Lisa Overdrive	William Gibson	1988
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 Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect	Roger Williams	1994
Ready Player One	Ernest Cline	2011
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.
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
The Princess Ineffabelle	Stanisław Lem	1965	from the Cyberiad
Simulacron 3	Daniel F. Galouye	1964
Snow Crash	Neal Stephenson	1992
Sophie's World	Jostein Gaarder	1991
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
The Trouble with Bubbles	Philip K. Dick	1953
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.
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
Vurt	Jeff Noon	1993
The Wonderland Gambit	Jack L. Chalker	1995
Words Made Flesh	Ramsey Dukes	1987
You're Another	Damon Knight	1955

Animation/anime/cartoons, film, television, & theater

• Good Bye Lenin! (2003), by Wolfgang Becker, a Berlin family tries to make the feeble mother believe that East Germany did not fall
• Holodeck, a simulator aboard starships and other facilities used for training and recreation in the Star Trek fictional universe (particularly in and since the series Star Trek: The Next Generation)
• La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream, 1635), a Spanish play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) that evolved from the legends of the early years of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
• Possible Worlds (1990) and the 2000 film adaptation

Animation, anime, and cartoons

• .hack//SIGN, an anime series about a person whose mind is trapped in an online computer role-playing game
• 12 oz. Mouse, an American surreal comedy/thriller minimalist cartoon
• Aeon Flux (1991) took place in a cartoon world
• Danger Room, a training simulator from the (X-Men) universe
• Detective Conan: The Phantom of Baker Street'(2002)
• Eternal Family (1997), surreal comedy anime OVA
• Gantz by Hiroya Oku
• Ghost in the Shell (1995), postcyberpunk anime film and series
• Lyoko, the virtual world run by a super computer in the animated series Code Lyoko
• Megazone 23 (1985-9), an anime OVA series created by Noboru Ishiguro and Shinji Aramaki based on a simulated reality of Tokyo controlled by a super computer
• Noein, an anime directed by Kazuki Akane and Kenji Yasuda where a simulated reality is created
• Paranoia Agent by Satoshi Kon
• Robotech: The Movie (1986), anime adaptation of Megazone 23
• Serial Experiments Lain, anime series by Chiaki J. Konaka
• Zegapain (2006), anime series

Film

• Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) (1997), by Alejandro Amenábar (remade as Vanilla Sky, 2001)
• Avalon (2001), by Mamoru Oshii
• Avatar (2009), by James Cameron
• Brainscan (1994), by John Flynn
• Brainstorm (1983), science fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull and starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood
• Cargo (2009), directed by Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter
• Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) written by Sean Hood
• Dark City (1998) by Alex Proyas, in which the sim is halted every night at midnight, rearranged, and then restarted; people are given false memories of different lives than they led in the previous 24 hours, reminiscent of last Thursdayism
• eXistenZ (1999), by David Cronenberg, in which level switches occur so seamlessly and numerously that at the end of the movie it is difficult to tell whether the main characters are back in "reality"
• Inception (2010), by Christopher Nolan, where an extractor invades dreams to steal information and ideas, but is soon asked to implant an idea instead of stealing one.
• Jacob's Ladder (1990), thriller directed by Adrian Lyne
• Lost Highway (1997), by David Lynch
• Surrogates (2009), by Jonathan Mostow
• The Island (2005), directed by Michael Bay
• The Matrix series (1999–2003), by the Wachowski brothers
• The Nines (2007), unknowingly to the viewer, is focused completely on the subject of simulated reality
• The Thirteenth Floor (1999), directed by Josef Rusnak
• Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven and based on the Philip K. Dick story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
• Tron (1982), by Walt Disney Pictures
• The Truman Show (1998), in which the titular character unknowingly lives his entire life in a false reality created to make a voyeur television show about him
• Welt am Draht (1973), German film adaptation of the novel Simulacron-3 from Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• Vanilla Sky (2001), by Cameron Crowe
• Welcome to Blood City (1977), by Peter Sasdi

Television

• The Big O, by Hajime Yatate and Chiaki J. Konaka, N.B. the reality in question has not been confirmed as simulated, but it is extremely likely
• "The Cage" and "The Menagerie", the unaired pilot and later episodes (respectively) of Star Trek, screenplays by Gene Roddenberry
• Doctor Who episode "The Deadly Assassin", written by Robert Holmes
  • Matrix computer from the Doctor Who universe
• Doctor Who (2008) episode "Forest of the Dead", written by Steven Moffat
• Farscape episode "John Quixote" (2002) places the lead character in a virtual reality game
• Harsh Realm (1999), took place in a virtual world
• The Outer Limits episode "The Sentence" (1996)
• The Prisoner (1967-8)
• Red Dwarf episodes "Better Than Life" and "Back to Reality", by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor
• Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ship in a Bottle" (1993), the fictional Professor Moriarty of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories is allowed to exist in a holodeck simulation of the world
• Stargate SG-1 episode "The Gamekeeper"
• The Twilight Zone (1959), features a number of episodes involving false or simulated realities of some sort
• The X-Files, features a number of episodes involving simulated realities of some sort

Interactive fiction

• A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky

Computer and video games

• .hack series
• Active Worlds
• Alternate Reality
• Assassin's Creed
• Chrono Trigger
• Creatures
• Custom Robo
• Darwinia
• Deus Ex
• Digital Devil Saga
• Enter the Matrix
• Eternal Sonata
• Fallout 3
• Harvester
• Kingdom Hearts coded
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
• The Matrix: Path of Neo
• Persona
• Planescape:Torment
• Second Life
• Shadowrun
• Shin Megami Tensei
• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time
• The World Ends with You
• There.com
• Ultima (series), especially starting with Ultima V which simulated people's daily activities using a schedule, which was novel at the time.
• Xenosaga (series)