The science fiction novel Simulacron-3 was first published in 1964 by Daniel F. Galouye in the United States.

The book tells the story of a scientist developing a virtual city (total environment simulator) which would be used for marketing research purposes, thus ridding their world of the burdensome "pollsters" (opinion polling agents) who MUST, by law, be allowed to call on anyone.

The computer-city simulation in the story is so perfect that its inhabitants possess their own consciousness yet do not notice (except for one) that they exist only as electronic impulses in a computer. Soon, the lead scientist, Hannon Fuller, mysteriously dies and co-worker Morton Lynch disappears. The protagonist, Douglas Hall, realizes more and more that his world is probably not materially real and may be nothing more than a computer-generated simulation itself!

Probably influenced directly by Philip K. Dick's Truman Show-esque novel Time out of Joint, Simulacron-3 can be rightly regarded as the first description of virtual reality, even if the topic was already treated more than two thousand years ago in Plato's allegory of the cave.

The novel greatly influenced 1999's The Matrix and 2004's Till the End of Time, and was even filmed twice itself: first in 1973 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a two-part television play under the name Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), and in 1999 by Josef Rusnak as The Thirteenth Floor.

The term "simulacron" is given to the simulator just built. "Simulectronics" is that world's technology which simulates reality, and "Simulacron 3" is the title of the book because there are three levels of 'reality' in the novel (or three levels of computer simulation, since the reader may surmise that the 'final' world may be simulated, also). The book's title is evocative of simulacrum, a superficial image representing a non-existent original, as well as Chronos, the ancient Greek personification of time (which is the root of words like chronograph, chronological, chronicle, etc.).

1964 novels | American novels | Science fiction novels

Simulacron-3