One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his son was never born; and he's not an ordinary college...

"An exuberantly realized, exciting, and sweet-natured cyber-quest. Cline's imaginative and rollicking coming-of-age geek saga has a smash-hit vibe."--Booklist, starred review. "Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people...

Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday's contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything. Hidden within Halliday's vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS a thousand times more wondrous - and addictive - than even Wade dreamed possible. With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest - a last Easter egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious...

"Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic, pilots their Wobble and entertains himself by surfing the records of the obliterated planet Earth stored on his Swift Wheel for Al Pacino trivia, recipes for reconstituted sushi, and high fashion trends....

When his own high-tech start up turns into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family who has amassed an illegal fortune, finds the line between fantasy and reality becoming blurred when a virtual war for dominance is triggered.

Enter the adrenaline-laced story that started it all: the fate of two worlds hangs in the balance of one man's choices as dreams and reality collide.

Thomas Hunter narrowly escapes mysterious assailants only to encounter a silent bullet that clips his head . . . and his world goes black. He awakens in an alternate reality and soon finds himself pulled between two worlds. In one, Thomas is an average guy working in a coffeehouse.

...

"Eliza McKay is an Extractionist: an expert in the virtual reality space where people's minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky--it's McKay's job to quietly extract them. And McKay's job just got a lot more dangerous. After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try to hack her cybernetic implants directly....

"There's no such thing as the life you're "supposed" to have... You know the future that people in the 1950s imagined we'd have? Well, it happened. In Tom Barren's 2016, humanity thrives in a techno-utopian paradise of flying cars, moving sidewalks, and moon bases, where avocados never go bad and punk rock never existed. because it wasn't necessary. Except Tom just can't seem to find his place in this dazzling, idealistic world, and that's before...

Seventeen-year-old Lake seeks the secret heart of the computer simulation that safeguards passengers aboard a ship orbiting a post-apocalyptic Earth, on a quest that will either save or destroy them all.

Dewey Jenkins wants to have the top science project in class to avoid summer school and win a state-of-the-art virtual reality video game, but after his friend Ferg accidentally breaks the console, they accidentally trigger the device, finding themselves transported inside a video game.