The volume Nebula by Anna Adamowicz is also interesting in this context. VR appears in prose (but also in films, TV series, comics, computer games) not only as a topic or a warning. It is also a very interesting metaphor. Perhaps we have always lived in some kind of symbolic overlay on reality, ever since we started using language – and literature in particular. And if so, VR is simply another, better (and better because it creates realities almost indistinguishable from the ‘real’ one) version of this overlay. Talking about virtual reality may therefore be talking about representation.
The religious metaphor is also interesting: talking about a world-system, a messiah intended to save the imprisoned people-players, or a pact between Satan and God is a new way of talking about issues already known to us, which does not mean that it is cognitively sterile.
Stories about virtual reality also alert us to new problems. In the world of Digital, we are more susceptible to control (by the authorities, corporations, criminals) and to manipulation (an example is the already famous fake news). We also need to constantly modify our legal system and carefully look at the changes that technology makes in our psyche. In other words, some problems will disappear, but new ones will appear in their place.
I think that science fiction is not only a genre or a convention but above all a certain way of thinking (not limited only to literature) about the reality surrounding us, which involves subjecting to critical reflection the seeds of the future perceived in our present. And it is particularly sensitive to criticism of technology.
Let us note an interesting coincidence of dates. Stanisław Lem’s essay, Summa Technologiae, was published in the 1960s, but the author of Solaris was often ahead of his times. In the 1980s, we are dealing with cyberpunk, which appears in the USA, but at the same time Jean Baudrillard publishes his philosophical essay in Europe. At the end of the 1990s, we are dealing with Lem’s ‘Mattress’, in the same year (1995) Jacek Dukaj’s ‘Irrehaare’ and R. A. Ziemkiewicz’s Fucked-up Fate of the Organ-Grinder were published. And only four years later, the first Matrix (interestingly, in the same year, 1999, two other films about VR premiered, perhaps less impressive, but equally interesting: Trzynaste piętro [The Thirteenth Floor] and eXistenZ). Therefore, those creators who are characterized by a particular way of thinking notice certain symptoms of the future in the reality around them.
To navigate more efficiently in modern times, a reality that is strange, tangled and dominated by technology, it is not sufficient to acquire knowledge about it (this would be impossible due to the far-reaching specialization in many fields). We need to learn how to think properly – and science fiction can be used precisely for this.