Browse

Atherleah Carroll grew up in the gang-controlled suburbs of Brisbane at the end of the twenty-first century. Determined to escape a life of mediocrity, she gained the skills to do so — only for an accident to change everything. On her sixteenth birthday she was inadvertently implanted with a Neural Enhancement Chip far beyond the standard government model, removing its limits and breaking its control parameters. Leah's life quickly becomes a battle on two fronts: in the dangerous real world, and inside the sprawling virtual-multiverse she enters to fund her education and independence.

Ilia is a gamer who has spent years chasing escapism. She discovers a game talked about in online forums as the most immersive game ever, made for a cutting-edge VR console: MEAT — a perfectly strange world of living flesh, full of strange details and biohorrific sensibilities. At first it's exactly what was promised. But after she starts seeing things she shouldn't and experiencing the game's systems in far more detail than should be possible, she begins to wonder. When she starts looking for answers, she discovers just how deep the rabbit hole goes — and just how many others may be out there, touched by a place she cannot comprehend. What are the sides to this conflict she can't yet see? What will she become as she digs deeper into what is — and what might be?

Val had returned from his latest tour of duty scarred in body and soul. Barely able to walk and drugged for pain, he thought his killing days were finally behind him. He couldn't have been more wrong. Endless Online is a hyper-futuristic game where players can truly live another life. Val loved the idea of starting over in virtual reality — but when someone he cares about turns up missing after chasing that same dream, Val quickly learns that Endless is no simple game. And if he can't figure out the dark secrets behind this realm of wizards, warriors, and intergalactic conquest, it's game over. For everyone.

It was just one fight, but it changed Kaiden Jericho's life forever. A street kid trying to leave his gang behind, Kaiden is offered a chance at the elite Nexus Academy — an institution that trains the next generation of fighters, leaders, hackers, and spies, then hires them out to companies, governments, and NGOs. Training happens through the Animus: a simulation so advanced that every death makes you closer to perfect. Kaiden would really rather skip the death part.

Jayke Cipher was, to his limited knowledge, one of the last people alive. The apocalypse struck Earth swiftly, and the monstrosities that roamed outside became an unavoidable part of his existence. Working from within a heavily defended compound, he watched them through surveillance cameras and cultivated a strange fascination with strange creatures. When the compound is breached and all other options are exhausted, his only option is the pod — a mysterious virtual reality capsule whose producer had released early in light of the apocalypse. He had always thought of it as suicide. But being eaten alive is worse.

In 2286, Alex Bell has spent 20 years in the full-dive VRMMO Eternal Dominion — a game that accounts for around 20% of the world's economy. He had risen to become vice guild leader, with his guild on the cusp of standing with the top guilds. Then fate ripped it all away. Alex awakens to find his 18-year-old self looking back at him in the mirror. It's 2266 and Eternal Dominion is about to launch. This time things will be different. This time he will succeed — and make sure his friends and family are along for the ride.

Strange things are happening in Second World, a massive multinational online RPG. Alliances shatter overnight, former friends draw blades, and a forgotten, worthless mine becomes the site of bitter, all-consuming battles. Every road in the province is controlled; no one enters or leaves a city without being checked. The weak suffer under the violence of eastern invaders. The strong have one goal: find the culprit — the strangest noob the virtual world has ever seen.

Ruslan signs a contract without reading it. All he remembers is that he has been hired to command a space fleet in a brand-new virtual reality game he knows nothing about. Objective: survive for six months. The game traps him in a strange body that refuses to obey, in a world teeming with powerful enemies where reputation and faction relationships are everything. After the inevitable new-player mistakes, Ruslan is forced to rethink his strategy and abandon traditional gaming conventions. What new trials await him — trials even the game designers failed to anticipate?

When virtual reality becomes real enough to feel like another world entirely, Valia Online arrives. A man running from his past joins the game to forget it all — calling himself Jack Thorn, he chooses an undead race: Deathlord. A mage by choice and a swordsman by necessity, he soon finds out he'll need much more than magic and steel to survive. Strategy, creativity, and carefully chosen words can often accomplish what simple attacks can't. But as the game becomes too real and touches a part of him he'd rather leave buried, Jack is faced with two questions: who is he, really — and who should he become?

Real Fantasy Online is the flagship product for the latest generation of neural-interface headsets, promising total immersion and the best NPC AIs ever created. But when the line between one's real self and one's digital identity becomes blurred, and the gods have their own agenda, who is the player and which is the game? Marcus has played any number of VR games and beta-tested dangerous systems. He usually disdains pre-order perks, but this time the bonus — the ability to craft your character's backstory and have it integrated into the game's lore — is too tempting to pass up. He opts to make a character purely for fun, with no interest in being all-powerful. Things aren't quite what they seem, however, and his backstory and character class have implications he never would have imagined.

Seventeen-year-old Ren Haddon hasn't had an easy life. His drug addict parents used him as a lab rat and left him almost crippled for life. After they were caught, he went on to spend his life in the hospital — under constant care, the white walls of his room were all he knew. That changed the day his name was drawn from millions of others to receive a one-of-a-kind class in the new virtual world game called F.L.O.W. — Fantasy Life Online World. These are his adventures.

Alex is broke — pretty much always has been. A misspent youth led to convictions and plea deals, leaving him with no career, no education, and no hope. Then the newest immersive MMO arrives with the ability to convert in-game earnings into real currency. Seizing the opportunity, Alex joins The Realms as Jack Alltrades, determined to make money any way he can. A master of none, he'll learn every trade possible to turn his life around — from merchant deals and goblin labor to corporate intrigue and dragon-saving quests.

Successful gamer Samantha Jade Jacobs, formerly known as Titania, was feeling the bitter sting of betrayal — kicked from the team she founded and made great — when the gaming world was turned upside down. A new type of game was going into Beta, and Samantha would be one of the few testers. Little did anyone know that the road would be longer than anybody thought. Follow Samantha's journey into the world of Mundus and beyond on a trip nobody could have foreseen, not even the gods themselves.

Punished for his toxic online behavior, Chad faces a thirty-day sentence of full-immersion therapy designed to improve his anger issues. For his endless trolling, he's forced to play as a forest troll — the most hated race in Isle of Mythos — so that he can finally experience what it's like to be on the other side. To make matters worse, the heroes sent to rid the world of evil aren't heroes at all: they're violent felons on their own twisted paths to redemption. Playing as a monster in a world where it ain't easy being green, what could possibly go wrong?

What happens when you find yourself immersed in a fantasy world you have never imagined, and you don't know the rules? How much can one bathrobe and a spoon change the fate of the world? Is there enough ramen to ever sate a gamer's hunger?

Paralyzed in a workplace accident, Lox's life is looking bleak — he cannot even use the hardware that would let him play the full-immersion games everyone else enjoys. Then a company called New Universal Frontiers makes him an offer: access to their technology despite his injuries, in exchange for one condition — he can never leave the game. Once inside, Lox quickly realizes this is far more than a game. Given a class everyone considers useless due to its inherent dangers, he endures a long and painful series of trials as he masters his magical abilities. As he explores the depths of the game's magic system, he discovers there is far more going on than anyone ever expected.

Meryll Watkins is a corporate IT consultant on her way home to Titan after an exhausting business trip on Mars. After a run-in with security, she's ready to spend the first wing of the flight getting some well-earned sleep. When she wakes up, she finds herself floating in an empty void with several new cybernetic implants jutting from her skin — and when she closes her eyes, she can see a dizzying display of data and machinery. She has somehow ended up inside an unfamiliar starship, acting as its living central processor. Coaxing the ragtag crew to release her back into the physical world, she discovers she's been unintentionally recruited by a band of pirates who mistook her for a human-like ship core. What follows is an exploration of her bizarre new existence, the day-to-day life of a space outlaw, a grand conspiracy, and the importance of an imperfect found family.

It is 2054 and unemployment is at an all-time high. In the era of the quantum computer, autonomous systems have taken over as the backbone of the workforce. Justin, twenty years old and unemployed, has nothing holding him back — so when his government stipend covers the cost, he signs up to play Imagitech's brand new full-immersion virtual reality game: A Time of Heroes. Justin plays Artisan, an alien AI trapped on Earth — inventor, hacker, and gadgeteer to a team of heroes navigating an alternate America where superheroes and villains are on the rise and forces of good and evil battle for the future.

Log in or die. Clay Hopewell has less than twenty-four hours before the ZERO virus kills him, and the only option left is digitally uploading his consciousness into Arcane Kingdom Online — the most advanced virtual reality game ever released. Surviving the risky upload is just the start. Clay wakes up to a fantasy world in crisis, a starting race that half the population despises, a locked mage class, and a malevolent in-game glitch hunting players. If he doesn't learn the rules fast, his second chance will be worse than his first.

After learning he has just months to live, Gemini Fowler is granted one shot to cheat death when a billionaire game-developer offers to transfer his consciousness into a virtual realm. The catch: the only VR capable of receiving him is the unreleased game Enora Online, and Gemini must survive until level ten or be permanently wiped from the servers — and from existence. Welcome to Enora Online, where virtual is reality.