I have been going nuts trying to remember the name of this series. From what I can remember it was about a girl who moved to a new town, and got a new (hot) boyfriend. They were friends with a girl and her boyfriend who always dressed in baggy clothing, even though they had great bodies (oh early ’90s I love you). As time went on it came out that they (accidentally) killed the guy’s ex-girlfriend. I remember there was an annoying friend who played an Edith Piaf record to mess with them (Je ne regrette rien). Also there was a girl who wore rice powder makeup, and they hung out in a diner and ate linzer cookies. The title had like diary or journal or something in the title. 

I would love to reread this series and so far I’m totally stumped. If anyone can help I’d be their new best friend.

Here’s hoping,

Jenn

*****

I am looking for a science fiction novel. I read it in the 1990s (or possibly the late ’80s) in paperback. 

In this novel, aliens came to Earth a long long time ago and replaced real life with some kind of dream life. Most people are little balls of glowing substance, but a few who are extra hardy (or hardy or something) are in some kind of suspended animation. People imagine lives and then get to act them out like some kind of super-immersive MMORPG (although the book was written before MMORPGs, so that term is never used).

The book starts with the narrator and his childhood sweetheart growing up in some middle-America small town in the mid-20th century. Neither of them knows that their lives are not “real,” but the childhood sweetheart starts to figure it out, and eventually, she disappears, leaving behind a placeholder self. Eventually the narrator realizes that the “real” her is gone, and he figures out how to break out of the dream life too. I remember he ends up on a beach in Hawaii with piles of cash in his pockets, where he runs into the childhood sweetheart and they set out to have a lot of adventures in this dream world where they can be anything, do anything.

Eventually, they get all bored with that, and he goes to talk to one of the aliens. It turns out he is a little glowing ball but the sweetheart is in suspended animation. I recall that he asks if in all these centuries of dreaming, he ever had even one original dream or moment of a dream, and the alien says no. So the narrator and his sweetheart decide to leave the dream. The aliens hooks them up with new bodies and put them outside the dream complexes, which are in the plains of North America. Cities and all the traces of human occupation are gone except for the dome that leads back to the dreamworld. 

They get along okay and then the sweetheart gets sick or injured and they realize that they don’t have the skill to survive in a wilderness. So they go back to the dome where the aliens agree to completely wipe their memories and put them back in the dream world. They decide to have their “first life” in a Native American tribe in the same area where they went when they were outside, so that after another round of centuries of dreams and adventures, when they get bored, they will have the skills to survive out there. 

I can’t recall who wrote it, what it’s called, anything USEFUL like that. And nothing I try on the internet has turned the thing up. I’m hoping one of the Vine readers can help me out here.

Thanks!

SorchaRei

Share!