Exit to Reality
Forbes, Edith. Exit to Reality: A Novel. Seattle: Seal Press, 1998[[1]] (Foster: 1997; see below). Listed on line (Google Book) as of August 2023 (reprint?) Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 1998.
Publisher's blurb — so we infer — on Google Books webpage; see note below:
When Euclid (real name Lydian) ventures onto the Random Queries and Idle Speculation bulletin board she meets Proteus (real name Merle), a self-described misfit who admits to unemployment. Lydian is wary of this impossibility. After all, it is the 29th century and such oddities have been eliminated. But curiosity and a desire to jettison her culturally induced techno-stupor lead Lydian to rendezvous with Merle, igniting an unlikely meeting of the minds - and bodies. Lydian and Merle's careening love affair takes them from Paris to Jamaica, from the wrong side of the law to the far side of late-millennium family values, and ultimately, to a face-off between technology and civilization that spurs Lydian to question - and then dismantle - the very essence of human existence.[2]
See for feminist cyberpunk, or "cyberfiction" anyway, and questions of embodiment and the reality of reality. Covered in Thomas Foster's "'The Postproduction of the Human Heart': Desire, Identification, and Virtual Embodiment in Feminist Narratives of Cyberspace" who presents Forbes's book as giving "a lesbian feminist twist to" the premise of a world of "virtual simulation" (VR) in films like THE MARIX and THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR. From Foster, pp. 472-73:
The narrator of this novel, Lydian, becomes involved with another character, Merle, who initially appears as a man. Lydian learns, however, that Merle is able to change physical form and in fact tells Lydian that "he" has "lost the connection to my original body" and no longer remembers who "he was" (Forbes 1997, 94). Merle proceeds to teach Lydian to morph, and immediately afterward Merle changes sex, revealing that "she" only appeared as a man "because I thought that was the only way you'd ever love me" (113). It is only later that Lydian realizes that this seeming violation of the laws of nature can be explained only if her physical brain was connected into a virtual reality program that generated "every bit of sensory data [she] received" (167). In the course of the novel, it is revealed that the entire population of the planet was downloaded into a simulation, connecting "the biological to the electronic, so that the electronic could become the medium of connection between minds" (173). The effects of this realization are summed up when Lydian realizes that "I had never questioned my world" but had instead taken it as an "inevitability"; now, however, she sees it "as an arbitrary design, which could have been designed differently" (223).
As the novel proceeds, the two characters "have already begun to redesign their world. The novel causally links Lydian and Merle's transgression of heterosexual norms with their gaining the ability to reprogram the computer simulation and to make it more interactive, instead of simply accepting the computer's input" (p. 473).
RDE, finishing, 5Aug23
