Dennis Holland

I came to this book because it was recommend for "fans of The Matrix," of which I am one. I listened to the audiobook twice in quick succession, so enthralled was I with the world Galouye created. (I docked one star from what you may think should have been a five-star thrall for the reason that Galouye's characters are slightly cardboard-y and straight from central casting.) Basically, Galouye's story can be summed up thusly: If you create a simulated world peopled with simulated people who think they're in fact human and real, and if those simulated people in their simulated world create their own simulation (with its own simulated peoples and environs), you the sim-world creator, upon discovering this, will undergo your own specular teleological mise-en-abyme wherein you will suspect that your own world is perhaps a simulation of yet some other and (hopefully unsimulated) "real" world. And that feeling will not leave you. At least, it hasn't yet left me.… (meer)