The Demi-Monde: Winter, by Rod Rees

The Demi-Monde: Winter, by Rod Rees.  William Morrow, 2010.  517 pp.  978-0-06-207034-0.

... in which a young woman is enlisted to save the US President's daughter, who is trapped in a virtual world populated by Nazis, terrorists, and various villains from world history.

The Demi-Monde: Winter is the first book in a series involving a virtual reality (the Demi-Monde), set in 2018.  This virtual world was created to simulate urban warfare scenarios for US soldiers in training, and the programmers populated the world with "dupes", virtual duplicates of real-life people, famous and otherwise.  The computer world's technology is set to be comparable to the technology available in Victorian times.  The most prominent people populating the Demi-Monde are some the worst people to ever live, including Reinhard Heydrich (one of Hitler's right-hand men), Lavrentii Beria (Stalin's chief of police), Tomas de Torquemada (a prominent figure in the Catholic Church's Spanish Inquisition), and plenty of others.  The catch?  The people in the Demi-Monde don't know that they're not real; all they know is that living in the Demi-Monde is hell.  Unfortunately for the real-life humans who are spending time in this computer simulation, if you die in the computer, then you die in real life.  Somehow, the US President's daughter Norma has been lured into the Demi-Monde, and is being held captive by Heydrich and his lackeys.  The US Army recruits a young woman, Ella Thomas, to infiltrate the Demi-Monde and bring Norma out safely.  However, the rulers of the Demi-Monde have a bigger plan for Norma and all of the residents of the computer world.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami.  Vintage International, 1991.  400 pp.  978-0-679-74346-0.


... in which there are some unicorns and some men with strange minds.

This book has two seemingly unrelated stories happening simultaneously.  In one story arc (the hard-boiled wonderland), a man in his thirties is working as a Calcutec.  His job basically involves him working as a human computer; his consciousness has been split so that one part of his mind can process and encrypt data, while leaving the main part of his mind to function as a normal human's mind.  He goes to work for a professor whose laboratory is hidden in an underground cavern infested with man-eating monsters.  He soon finds that this job has pulled him into some kind of larger conflict.  The second story arc (the end of the world) involves a man arriving in a town surrounded by a wall.  The townsfolk never leave their town, as they understand themselves to be at the end of the world.  The town harbors a herd of unicorns, and all people coming into the town must agree to be separated from their shadows.  The man is sent to work as the Dreamreader at the Library, while he puzzles out the purpose of the town and the significance of the shadows and the unicorns.  Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that the two stories are actually part of one larger narrative.