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Simulacron-3 [SIMULACRON-3] [Paperback]
Simulacron-3 [SIMULACRON-3] [Paperback]
- GenresScience Fiction
Paperback
Published June 1, 2011
3 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Daniel F. Galouye
119 books77 followersDaniel Francis Galouye (11 February 1920 – 7 September 1976) was an American science fiction writer. During the 1950s and 1960s, he contributed novelettes and short stories to various digest-size science fiction magazines, sometimes writing under the pseudonym Louis G. Daniels.
After Galouye (pronounced Gah-lou-ey) graduated from Louisiana State University (B.A.), he worked as a reporter for several newspapers. During World War II, he served in the US Navy as an instructor and test pilot, receiving injuries that led to later health problems. On December 26, 1945, he married Carmel Barbara Jordan. From the 1940s until his retirement in 1967, he was on the staff of The States Item. He lived in New Orleans but also had a summer home across Lake Pontchartrain at St. Tammany Parish in Covington, Louisiana.
In 1952, he sold his first novelette, Rebirth, to Imagination and then branched out to other digests, including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Between 1961 and 1973, Galoyue wrote five novels, notably Simulacron Three, basis of the movie The Thirteenth Floor and the 1973 German TV miniseries, Welt am Draht (directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder). His first novel, Dark Universe (1961) was nominated for a Hugo.
In 2007, Galouye was named as the recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which is co-sponsored by the heirs of Paul M.A. Linebarger (who wrote as Cordwainer Smith) and Readercon. The jury for this award recognizes a deceased genre writer whose work should be "rediscovered" by the readers of today, and that newly rediscovered writer is a deceased guest of honor at the following year's Readercon. Galouye was named 6 July 2007 by Barry N. Malzberg and Gordon Van Gelder, speaking on behalf of themselves and the other two judges, Martin H. Greenberg and Mike Resnick.
After Galouye (pronounced Gah-lou-ey) graduated from Louisiana State University (B.A.), he worked as a reporter for several newspapers. During World War II, he served in the US Navy as an instructor and test pilot, receiving injuries that led to later health problems. On December 26, 1945, he married Carmel Barbara Jordan. From the 1940s until his retirement in 1967, he was on the staff of The States Item. He lived in New Orleans but also had a summer home across Lake Pontchartrain at St. Tammany Parish in Covington, Louisiana.
In 1952, he sold his first novelette, Rebirth, to Imagination and then branched out to other digests, including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Between 1961 and 1973, Galoyue wrote five novels, notably Simulacron Three, basis of the movie The Thirteenth Floor and the 1973 German TV miniseries, Welt am Draht (directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder). His first novel, Dark Universe (1961) was nominated for a Hugo.
In 2007, Galouye was named as the recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which is co-sponsored by the heirs of Paul M.A. Linebarger (who wrote as Cordwainer Smith) and Readercon. The jury for this award recognizes a deceased genre writer whose work should be "rediscovered" by the readers of today, and that newly rediscovered writer is a deceased guest of honor at the following year's Readercon. Galouye was named 6 July 2007 by Barry N. Malzberg and Gordon Van Gelder, speaking on behalf of themselves and the other two judges, Martin H. Greenberg and Mike Resnick.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 7, 2025
Story zieht sich im zweiten Teil, aber Pflichtlektüren für Markt- und Sozialforscher
October 26, 2024
What starts like a crime solving mystery quickly goes philosophical, questioning the nature of reality itself. Unfortunately the protagonist takes quite a while to catch up with that twist. It was very interesting to see how the author imagined the future to look like though.
December 11, 2024
Part of my initiative to quit social media (lol ig good reads doesn’t count) is to read more, so I’ll read
I watched world on a wire recently and it was a crazy good movie, so I figured I’d read the source material which inspired the matrix.
Compared to the movie it’s a lot less focused on the existential scope of what simulation theory entails, but paints a much more cohesive picture of the story at the very least bc I couldn’t comprehend everything that was going on in the movie.
I watched world on a wire recently and it was a crazy good movie, so I figured I’d read the source material which inspired the matrix.
Compared to the movie it’s a lot less focused on the existential scope of what simulation theory entails, but paints a much more cohesive picture of the story at the very least bc I couldn’t comprehend everything that was going on in the movie.
July 17, 2025
I recently read Simulacron-3 for our local sf reading group. I'd heard about it in histories of cyberpunk and virtual world fiction and probably sold a bunch of copies when working in a used book store, but never actually sat down and read the thing through.
It's good stuff, a very mid-20th-century American science fiction novel: fast dialog, racing action, a combination of idealism with satire. It reminds me very much of contemporary works by Pohl and Kornbluth, as well as early Phil Dick.
The plot concerns an engineer finishing up a new project: an artificial world, populated by artificial people, all stored in computer memory. Yet strange things start happening, including disappearing people, vanishing objects, and a CEO getting increasingly power mad.
On its own terms the book is satisfying as a thriller as well as for its, ah, world building. The action starts quickly and doesn't let up, resting on our main character's escalating sense of madness. I enjoyed the string of invention, from a Constitutional amendment against smoking to widespread use of variable-strength laser weapons. As a thriller we don't get a lot of psychological depth, as the text is about incident and reaction. The prose is efficient, not lyrical.
It's equally interesting for its place in genre history, as an early example of the fake/virtual world idea (Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" came first). I was impressed by it as an example of the vast hopes and dreams people had for early digital technology. You can see echoes of Simulacron-3 in all kinds of reality stories. The three tiers of reality reminded me most recently of the film Inception.
It's also interesting as a sign of the psychology narrative's decline. Science fiction and pop culture went through a period of treating psychology as a hard, predictive science and sometimes featured psychologists as narrative-defining explainers. Think of the end of Psycho, for example, or how science fiction stories in the 1940s sometimes had people using psych evals as props (Heinlein did this at least once). But that trope or set of tropes faded in the 1960s, perhaps due to the rise in anti-psychiatry. In Simulacron-3 a psychologist is a pivotal character. His ability to explain what the narrator is going through appears, at first, as a plausible way to settle things. Then... stuff happens, which I won't spoil.
The book is dated in several ways. The technology is a bit abstract. The idea of an artificial world is less shocking when we have a generation who had The Sims game available, for example. Gender roles may appall today's readers, as women are generally secretaries and sex objects.
Simulacron-3 was filmed several times. I haven't seen World on a Fire (1973) but did enjoy The Thirteenth Floor (1999).
I've never read anything else by Daniel Galouye, but now I'd like to.
It's good stuff, a very mid-20th-century American science fiction novel: fast dialog, racing action, a combination of idealism with satire. It reminds me very much of contemporary works by Pohl and Kornbluth, as well as early Phil Dick.
The plot concerns an engineer finishing up a new project: an artificial world, populated by artificial people, all stored in computer memory. Yet strange things start happening, including disappearing people, vanishing objects, and a CEO getting increasingly power mad.
On its own terms the book is satisfying as a thriller as well as for its, ah, world building. The action starts quickly and doesn't let up, resting on our main character's escalating sense of madness. I enjoyed the string of invention, from a Constitutional amendment against smoking to widespread use of variable-strength laser weapons. As a thriller we don't get a lot of psychological depth, as the text is about incident and reaction. The prose is efficient, not lyrical.
It's equally interesting for its place in genre history, as an early example of the fake/virtual world idea (Frederik Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World" came first). I was impressed by it as an example of the vast hopes and dreams people had for early digital technology. You can see echoes of Simulacron-3 in all kinds of reality stories. The three tiers of reality reminded me most recently of the film Inception.
It's also interesting as a sign of the psychology narrative's decline. Science fiction and pop culture went through a period of treating psychology as a hard, predictive science and sometimes featured psychologists as narrative-defining explainers. Think of the end of Psycho, for example, or how science fiction stories in the 1940s sometimes had people using psych evals as props (Heinlein did this at least once). But that trope or set of tropes faded in the 1960s, perhaps due to the rise in anti-psychiatry. In Simulacron-3 a psychologist is a pivotal character. His ability to explain what the narrator is going through appears, at first, as a plausible way to settle things. Then... stuff happens, which I won't spoil.
The book is dated in several ways. The technology is a bit abstract. The idea of an artificial world is less shocking when we have a generation who had The Sims game available, for example. Gender roles may appall today's readers, as women are generally secretaries and sex objects.
Simulacron-3 was filmed several times. I haven't seen World on a Fire (1973) but did enjoy The Thirteenth Floor (1999).
I've never read anything else by Daniel Galouye, but now I'd like to.
December 28, 2025
Simulacron-3, also titled Counterfeit World in some editions, generates interest as a precursor to cyberpunk. It exists as an example of the transition from the 1950s science fiction of social commentary to the mind-bending, reality warping science fiction from the mid 1960s to mid 1970s. Published in 1964, the novel appears at first to be a combination murder mystery / social satire dystopia. In a world in which it is illegal to refuse an opinion poll on products, services, and politics, and in which half the world's population seems to be employed in the business of gathering opinion polling data from the other half, a computer engineer works on a project that will, if successful, put all the pollsters out of a job. His predecessor died under mysterious circumstances, and an associate appears at a party and then just as suddenly disappears, leaving behind no trace of ever having existed. The big project is a giant computer that creates a simulated world. All one needs to do is to put the question to the computer, and then the computer will run a simulation and produce an answer. How many people will prefer product X over product Y? Run the simulation and find out. The only trick is that the simulation world has to be continuously running and the simulated people inside of it have to believe they are real. What could go wrong?
The novel has the pacing, dialogue, and characters of many sf novels at the time, the ones in which the plot is essentially man on the run discovers what's really going on. The novel also takes a side turn into philosophy. Are the creators of the simulated world in the position of God? If so, what does that suggest about God? How does a person tell whether they are a real person or a simulated one? The novel raises many intriguing questions, and thankfully Galouye does not feel the need, unlike Heinlein, to answer all of them.
The detriments of the novel are mostly down to the publishing requirements of paperback and magazine science fiction of the time. There has to be a love interest of some kind. The dialogue must appear snappy, but not too intellectual. The writing needs to be lean rather than stylish. The primary purpose of the writing is to deliver plot, not poetry. Also, this novel is pre-Dune, so rather than being required to write a book a yard wide, the writer must write a book only inches wide. All of which is to say that there could be more to this book than there is, and the ideas certainly warrant some development before we get to the world-crashing ending. However, Simulacron-3 is for the most part enjoyable, thought-provoking, and surprisingly timely.
The novel has the pacing, dialogue, and characters of many sf novels at the time, the ones in which the plot is essentially man on the run discovers what's really going on. The novel also takes a side turn into philosophy. Are the creators of the simulated world in the position of God? If so, what does that suggest about God? How does a person tell whether they are a real person or a simulated one? The novel raises many intriguing questions, and thankfully Galouye does not feel the need, unlike Heinlein, to answer all of them.
The detriments of the novel are mostly down to the publishing requirements of paperback and magazine science fiction of the time. There has to be a love interest of some kind. The dialogue must appear snappy, but not too intellectual. The writing needs to be lean rather than stylish. The primary purpose of the writing is to deliver plot, not poetry. Also, this novel is pre-Dune, so rather than being required to write a book a yard wide, the writer must write a book only inches wide. All of which is to say that there could be more to this book than there is, and the ideas certainly warrant some development before we get to the world-crashing ending. However, Simulacron-3 is for the most part enjoyable, thought-provoking, and surprisingly timely.
May 6, 2025
Dit is niet perse wat je harde scifi zou kunnen noemen, ligt meer in de speculatieve hoek maar zijn tijd ver vooruit. De consequenties van techniek zijn vaak later zichtbaar, maar je kunt er alsnog je vingers aan branden. Het was een interessant spanningsveld maar had van mij nog iets meer diepte mogen hebben. Ik moest ook denken aan die opdringerige straat reclames uit altered carbon bij die reactie monitors. Het kan mij nooit te filosofisch worden qua scifi dus dat is wel een grote pre.
October 28, 2025
I feel like the first 3/4 of the book is great, then it loses momentum. I also found the ending anticlimactic, but it could be due to all the sci fi I’ve been introduced to that this book wasn’t aware of, being published in 1964. I appreciate the authors description of the world & I’d like to take a ride in an air car. Now I gotta go watch the Matrix.
May 31, 2025
A world inside a world, inside a world....
With the advent of this technology dependent individual, society, and world, very few times do authors have the power to surprise twentieth first century readers: this little book is one of those works that can.
Provocative, mysterious (at some point one cannot decipher where the whole plot is leading) and mind-blowing, the universes that are depicted set up the perfect breeding ground for philosophical debates and lots of questioning.
To begin with, nothing can be taken for granted for the final realisation of the main character takes place at the very end of the story.
A beautiful predecessor of masterworks of science fiction such as the Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Mona Lisa Overdrive and so on.
What makes a human being a human being? What can be called human? How far can artificial intelligence go? What is reality?
With the advent of this technology dependent individual, society, and world, very few times do authors have the power to surprise twentieth first century readers: this little book is one of those works that can.
Provocative, mysterious (at some point one cannot decipher where the whole plot is leading) and mind-blowing, the universes that are depicted set up the perfect breeding ground for philosophical debates and lots of questioning.
To begin with, nothing can be taken for granted for the final realisation of the main character takes place at the very end of the story.
A beautiful predecessor of masterworks of science fiction such as the Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Mona Lisa Overdrive and so on.
What makes a human being a human being? What can be called human? How far can artificial intelligence go? What is reality?
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews