Simulacron-3

The science fiction novel Simulacron-3 (also published under the title Counterfeit World) was first published in 1964 by Daniel F. Galouye in the United States.

Plot summary

It tells the story of a virtual city (total environment simulator) developed by a scientist and intended for marketing research purposes, thus ridding this virtual city of its burdensome "pollsters" (opinion polling agents) who must, by law, be allowed to poll anyone for their opinion on a potential product, law, situation,... etc. The computer-city simulation in the story is so well programmed that its inhabitants possess their own consciousness yet are unaware, except for one, that they are only electronic impulses in a computer. The simulator's lead scientist, Hannon Fuller, dies mysteriously and a co-worker, Morton Lynch, vanishes. The protagonist, Douglas Hall, is with Lynch when he vanishes and Hall subsequently struggles to suppress his inchoate madness. As time and events unwind, he realizes more and more that his own world is probably not "real" and may be nothing more itself than another computer-generated simulation. Probably influenced directly by Philip K. Dick's Truman Show-esque novel Time out of Joint, Simulacron-3 can be rightly regarded as one of the first descriptions of virtual reality, even if the topic can be met in Plato's two-thousand-year old allegory of the cave. The novel greatly influenced Ringu 3: Loop (1998), The Matrix (1999), and Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (2004), 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 3" is given to the just-built simulator, ostensibly because it is the third attempt at "Simulectronics" (this fictional world's technology which simulates reality). "Simulacron 3" is the book's title because there are three levels of 'reality' in the novel (or, three levels of computer simulation, if the reader surmises that the 'final,' "real" world is itself simulated). 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.).

Alternate title

The book is somewhat difficult to locate under the title Simulacron-3 and is more commonly found under the name Counterfeit World. For unknown reasons, the title Counterfeit World was used for an edition published in 1970. The texts of Counterfeit World and Simulacron-3 are identical.

Influences

Frederik Pohl's classic 1955 short story "The Tunnel Under the World" deals with similar themes, including a satirical critique of marketing research, though the simulated reality it describes is mechanical (an intricate scale model with only the inhabitants' consciousnesses residing in a computer) rather than purely electronic. Stanislaw Lem's short story "Skrzynie profesora Corcorana" from 1960 deals also with scientist building a machine simulating a complete reality for human consciousness trapped inside a computer.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

• (1973) the producer Fassbinder brought the story to cinema in Welt am Draht.
• (1999) the story was adapted for screen and filmed as The Thirteenth Floor.

See also

• Simulated reality

External links

• Fassbinder's film 1973 adaptation Welt am Draht at the Internet Movie Database