Simulacron-3
Simulacron-3
Book for July 2015
Group 3

The 1964 novel is the story of a virtual city for marketing research, developed to reduce the need for opinion polls. The computer-generated city simulation contains inhabitants with their own consciousness but for the most part unaware that they are made up of nothing but electric impulses in a computer. The only virtual person aware of his nature is driven almost mad by this knowledge. After the simulator’s lead scientist dies mysteriously and a co-worker vanishes, the protagonist, Douglas Hall, becomes responsible for the simulator and witnesses ever more strange events like vanishing people and missing landscape in his own 'real' world which leave him with only two possible interpretations: either he is fast becoming mad or himself living in a higher order simulator with the real 'real world' a third tier of reality. The title "Simulacron-3" refers to these three levels while "simulacron" is a derivative of simulacrum: a superficial image representing, in this case, a non-existent original.

The novel is the basis both for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 film 'Welt am Draht' and the 1999 movie 'The Thirteenth Floor', directed by Josef Rusnak.

About the Author
Daniel F. Galouye
Daniel Francis Galouye (11 February 1920 – 7 September 1976) was an American fiction writer. During the 1950s and 1960s, he contributed novelettes and short stories to various magazines, sometimes writing under the pseudonym Louis G. Daniels. Between 1961 and 1973, Galouye wrote five novels, notably Simulacron-3. He was a Navy pilot during WWII from 1942 to 1946. After this he began a career with the New Oreans newspaper The States-Item, first as a reporter, later as associate editor. His early death at age 56 was related to injuries sustained during the war. Richard Dawkins, the British atheist and zoologist, regards Galouye as one of his favorite fiction writers.