Virtuality: New novel by Derek Cressman (Science Fiction)

$24.95

It’s 2065 in Southern California. Virtuality’s post-Orwellian, pre-Matrix satire is a near-future dystopia on the verge of collapse. When a mysterious hacker disrupts transmissions, four quirky misfits find out that the streaming infotainments of their customized MyndScreen™ brain implants have noxious side effects—not to mention the addictive free extruded soyalgent food that everyone’s eating. Who will succumb to corporate commercialism on steroids? Who will survive the apocalypse?

 “Cressman’s argot-heavy novel is Kurt Vonnegut-like in its satire and offers a Bruegel-like canvas in its sweep.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A post-modern tale that rings the alarm bells loud and clear. Reading Virtuality will make you take a personal inventory of the “infotainment” you consume. This story has stayed with me and continues to color my perception of recent events in the news. A must read for fans of speculative fiction, although this one hits pretty close to home.”

—Tiffany Simpson, Book Haus

“Cressman’s Virtuality is above all else an exuberant excursion through a future that seems both bonkers and entirely plausible. In a world controlled by big corporations, virtuality and reality are on a collision course, and every character has to figure out how they fit into a society that appears monolithic, but is hollow inside. This is a novel written for the modern brain, exhilarating, zippy, and insightful, all the while using the pace and vocabulary of virtual reality to skewer it. A trip to the future you don’t want to miss!”

—Julie Price Carpenter, author of The Last Train Out of Hell

It’s 2065 in Southern California. Virtuality’s post-Orwellian, pre-Matrix satire is a near-future dystopia on the verge of collapse. When a mysterious hacker disrupts transmissions, four quirky misfits find out that the streaming infotainments of their customized MyndScreen™ brain implants have noxious side effects—not to mention the addictive free extruded soyalgent food that everyone’s eating. Who will succumb to corporate commercialism on steroids? Who will survive the apocalypse?

 “Cressman’s argot-heavy novel is Kurt Vonnegut-like in its satire and offers a Bruegel-like canvas in its sweep.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A post-modern tale that rings the alarm bells loud and clear. Reading Virtuality will make you take a personal inventory of the “infotainment” you consume. This story has stayed with me and continues to color my perception of recent events in the news. A must read for fans of speculative fiction, although this one hits pretty close to home.”

—Tiffany Simpson, Book Haus

“Cressman’s Virtuality is above all else an exuberant excursion through a future that seems both bonkers and entirely plausible. In a world controlled by big corporations, virtuality and reality are on a collision course, and every character has to figure out how they fit into a society that appears monolithic, but is hollow inside. This is a novel written for the modern brain, exhilarating, zippy, and insightful, all the while using the pace and vocabulary of virtual reality to skewer it. A trip to the future you don’t want to miss!”

—Julie Price Carpenter, author of The Last Train Out of Hell

Derek Cressman is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction. As a public policy advocate for over 30 years, he fought for democracy issues such as campaign finance reform and voting rights. His first novel, Reality™ 2048 (2019) was a finalist for bot the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Cressman holds a Stanford Novel Writing certificate. He lives and writes in Sacramento, California.

Author photo: Edward Erikson