How Top Fiction Writers Are Thinking About the Metaverse

A version of this article was published in TIME's newsletter Into the Metaverse. You can find past issues of the newsletter here. Technology and fiction have long shared a symbiotic relationship. Just as writers dreamed up fantastical worlds based on imagined technologies, those same worlds have inspired engineers, technologists, and scientists--spurring breakthroughs as well as thorny philosophical questions about their work. The term "metaverse" itself comes from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash; the comic strip Dick Tracy inspired the cell phone.