THE DARK SIDE OF DREAMS

In Noble’s novel, the granddaughter of a disgraced virtual reality entrepreneur embarks on a dangerous quest to restore her grandfather’s legacy.

When young tech genius Mira Patel finds the “missing mind-upload copy” of her grandfather Gunter Holden, who was a pioneer in the virtual after-death industry (“in the 22nd century, many cheat death by escaping into an after-death virtual reality program”), she is encouraged by legal investigator Byron Hernandez to upload it to the Shemathra’s Realm program. Shemathra is the market leader in after-death, run by the ruthless Donovan Hosseini, as Mira knows from her role on the company’s AI development team. Having usurped and altered Holden’s former after-death program and his company, Virtual Enterprise Inc., rumors arise that Hosseini is responsible for mass deletions of virtual inhabitants and the instigation of a brutal simulated religion worshipping the Wolf Goddess (“All are free to choose. Leave the peace of the One Will, only to embrace the sadness of human existence, but you do so at great peril. For these apostates, there is no going back”). Mira uploads Gunter’s consciousness and an avatar for herself, instructing her grandfather to record the realities of Shemathra’s Realm while masking as a tax-collecting sim. Across five dystopian virtual spheres, a horrified Gunter finds a society structured by wealth, with cruel punishments for failing to pay the steep costs of retaining memories and the semblance of life. Meanwhile, Mira must hide her activities before Hosseini discovers the truth and deletes her—both virtually and in reality. Noble delivers a complex, action-packed, dystopian yarn set in a future America of 2290, plagued by rumors of people and neighborhoods vanishing. The choppy chapters and variations in narrative form (including text presented as messages and reports) keep the reader engaged, as do the varying realities and structure of the virtual afterlife. Mira traverses a compelling emotional arc with her partner, Henry Yang, but Gunter is the focus of the most action—though his dawning horror over Hosseini’s cartoonish evil rings unconvincing, given his previous actions.

A chilling and fast-paced techno-thriller.