80 books like AlterWorld

While this book doesn’t depict today’s internet culture directly, it’s easy to imagine a dystopian future where most people spend their lives in a virtual reality world like the Oasis. As the main character navigates the challenges of this massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), he encounters dilemmas that resonate with today’s internet users: Can you truly trust someone you’ve only met online? How do you compete when others have far more resources?

Though the book is geared toward a young adult audience, its themes hit home for readers of all ages. I’m glad we have stories showing that tech isn’t always a neutral force in society and that retreating into an online space doesn’t solve the larger systemic problems in the world.

A Virtual Dream is a LitRPG that’s achieved legendary status. The story does so many things right. It establishes a compelling base-building story, gives meaning to NPCs, and pulls us to root for the oddball protagonist, whether or not we agree with him.

Mysteriously, books one and two of The Dragon’s Wrath haven’t been for sale online in years. Nonetheless, the demand for this series continues today and copies of each book still circulate the web, prized like treasures.

This book helped me realize how much more can be done with the LitRPG genre, and even though its story remains unfinished, the third book gives a considerable amount of resolution while leaving you hungry for more.

Did you know that LitRPG was originally forged in the east? The Moonlight Sculptor (or Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, LMS, as most know it) was so popular that its ravenous fans spread it to the rest of the world. The series sets up a number of important tropes for the genre going forward. Many consider LMS to be required reading, but you should know going in that it has a very spotty translation. It’s a massive body of work, too, spanning 57 published volumes.

In it, a hardworking miser pseudonymously known as Weed overprepares and over-delivers time and time again. Watching Weed grow and affect his world is exciting and addictive. LMS is really engaging. It’s an excellent, albeit silly read. If you only read one Korean LitRPG, read this one.

Solo Leveling (or Only I Level Up), in its webtoon form, is one of the peaks of LitRPG storytelling. The scenes are beautifully drawn, elevating the story beyond its original text-only format. You will be hard-pressed to find a more engaging read than this. The webtoon maintains tension incredibly well, and knows how to constantly supply its readers with little dopamine bombs along the way.

Solo Leveling plays with the formula of LitRPG, taking it off the rails by containing the game system inside the main character for much of the story, allowing him to grow stronger. Reading Solo Leveling is an absolute treat—perhaps doubly so for me as several of the niche ideas used in the story are also used in my books.

Julian wrote “A Rape in Cyberspace,” a widely-discussed Village Voice article about transgression in LambdaMOO, a very early virtual world (known as a MUD, for multi-user dimension) depicted completely in text.

Expanding this story into a deeper exploration of its fascinating user community, My Tiny Life was incredibly influential to me as a very young writer—convincing me that online games and virtual worlds offered endless stories and insights into the human condition.

His book remains crucial to understanding virtual worlds. Indeed, as I write in my own book, a senior developer at Meta desperately tried to get colleagues to read it, so they didn’t repeat past mistakes. Sad to say they didn’t, and so they did.

The world of Otherland is Earth, and the people are human, but woven into that familiar landscape is a virtual world that hasn’t quite happened yet. Imagine a virtual, digital world in which your avatar can ‘feel’. Why would you ever want to leave?

I first read Otherland soon after I started playing MMORPGs [Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games]. MMORPGs provide a ‘persistent’ world in which your character can fight, craft, build, or just socialize with other players. As such, it can become very immersive, and that’s just through the power of the imagination and some pixels on a screen. Now, imagine how immersive a virtual world would be. And how dangerous. 

Otherland started me thinking about technology and how humans relate to new innovations. It also inspired some of my own writing.

Before I read this book, I knew a bunch of facts about the different pieces of computer systems. After I read it, I understood how those pieces fit together. Building all those pieces myself, starting from the simplest logic gates and working my way up, made some fundamental concepts finally click—like how a processor decodes an instruction.

I especially loved the book’s hands-on structure: each chapter is a project where you get a specification and test suite for the component you need to build, but you have to figure out exactly how to build it for yourself. Completing the projects often felt like solving a fun puzzle, and it made the concepts stick in a way that just reading about them wouldn’t have.

If you’re looking for a novel that will make your mouth water with flavours and cravings, then Elisa Shua Dusapin is the writer you need. From the supermarket’s chilled section to hot pots of noodles, the pages of this short novel are an explosion for the senses. But the descriptions of the food are not only delicious, they also serve the purpose of the plot in this novel set over the course of one summer in Tokyo, about identity, loneliness, and language.

The Pachinko Parlour is translated from French into English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins and will be published in the UK on 18th August 2022.

There are a whole host of books about UX methods, but in our world of ever-advancing technology, there are few books that are really up to date with how to practice UX when the medium is no longer one-dimensional or even a physical product.

As AR and VR experiences are becoming more and more normal, I’ve appreciated being able to read a book that really captures the most recent evolution of UX methods towards a new virtual world of possibilities. 

The Land by Aleron Kong is the third litRPG on this list, and probably the most famous. Every litRPG uses a few ways to denote progression, but this book has an almost unending series of charts, numbers, rules, and powers for everything. And I do mean everything.

Character growth. Weapon quality. Town building. To career building. Even dungeon building.

Everything progresses. Everything has level-ups. The world is huge, and the events feel extremely epic. This is also the longest series on the list, with books so massive, you could knock a fool out with one.

Definitely worth the time, though. Don’t miss out.