Twilight Journey Author:L.P.Davies Twilight Journey opens with a man, apparently an amnesiac, struggling across a wasteland to a tatty café where the man behind the counter provides him with some helpful information: — "This is a café. It is larger than a snack-bar, smaller than a restaurant. A restaurant is often part of a hotel. A hotel is a larger & better-class place than a ... more »lodging-house. The customers who frequent this café are mainly long-distance lorry drivers & workmen. The lorries carry industrial components, foodstuffs-"
The protagonist, it turns out, is a 22nd-century scientist undergoing a form of virtual reality, called "senduction", which he's developed. The process was originally intended as an educational aid, but certain elements of the British government have less benign plans. This is, after all, science fiction. There is also a danger of "reversal", whereby a user of the senduction process may be brought back to the real world still believing themselves to be in a virtual one. The story moves between the outside world, where the scientist's colleagues & the men from the ministry are investigating the situation he's created; & the virtual reality, in which he eventually experiences a terrifying dystopian future as a result of his own beliefs about the uses to which the government will put his discovery.--Philip Challinor« less