Killobyte

Killobyte is a novel by the American writer Piers Anthony, published in 1993.

The game the book is named for, a pun on kilobyte, is second-generation virtual reality: players are connected to a machine that simulates sensation and reads brain signals, so that even the movement of a character is done by thinking about it. Its world is a set of settings and challenges through which players accumulate points, and much of the novel's pleasure is the puzzle work, since the obstacles are usually riddles and the rules have to be inferred from the game's behaviour. Players who die inside the game are punished electrically, which is where the title comes from, and the book is frank about the consequences for a person who cannot disconnect. Anthony wrote a large number of novels across several genres in this period and had already published the first books about the world of Xanth and the Apprentice Adept series; this one belongs to the group of early virtual-reality novels written while the commercial internet was still new, and its assumptions about what an online world would be like are part of the reason it is still read.