Virtuality

by Derek Cressman

Overview

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(TM) 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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781962931373
Publisher:	High Frequency Press
Publication date:	11/25/2025
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.03(d)

About the Author

Derek Cressman is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction based in Sacramento, California. Cressman wrote countless white papers, op-ed columns, fact sheets and reports as well as two books as part of a thirty-year career in public policy advocating for democracy issues such as campaign finance reform and voting rights. In 2019, he published his first novel, Reality(TM) 2048, which was a finalist in the Foreword Indies Book of the year and First Horizon American Fiction Book awards. Cressman is a graduate of the Stanford Online Certificate in Novel Writing.

Editorial Reviews

Libraries seeking dystopian novels about the move from high-tech to real-world experiences will especially appreciate how a variety of characters intersect on a broad playing field of possibilities and problems. This lends the story an immediacy and realistic overtone that embraces psychological revelation, motivations, and frightening possibilities of paradigm-changing actions. This transformative novel of the future provides plenty of moral, ethical, and technological fodder for book club discussions, offering much food for thought to individuals who love stories about future quandaries.

Midwest Book Review - D. Donovan

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

Kirkus Review

Cressman's writing is sharp, often layered with quotable lines and interesting parodies...focusing on breaking down virtual reality addiction and attempting to convince people to interact with each other and the natural world around them. Recommended to anyone who enjoys dystopian and speculative fiction. RECOMMENDED

The US Review of Books

A dystopian tour de force with resounding thematic power, Derek Cressman's novel, Virtuality, chronicles a world where society's addiction to virtual reality—particularly viewing endlessly streaming "infotainment" and mindlessly consuming advertisement-fueled products—has created generations of nonthinkers with the attention span of mayflies. The novel offers crisp prose, with superb world-building. Its real power, however, lies in the truth underlying the dystopia; so many lines resonate in today's society. At one point, for instance, a character says: "I'm still offline. It's like I don't exist." Additionally, numerous scenes are haunting for the plausible, nightmarish future they foresee, like babies in warehouses with robot attendants and video screens running nonstop above their cribs. Ready Player One meets Idiocracy meets 1984's Oceania, this is a must-read for fans of thought-provoking science fiction—one with the potential to become a dystopian classic.

BlueInk Review