this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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The book writing technique of the D'ni from Myst. It was not magic, it was essentially math and virtual reality. It just was in hand written books you could enter instead of a big room like the holodecks of Star Trek.
Sounds interesting. Is this from the game Myst or is there another piece of scifi that goes by the same name?
The details of how the books work mostly comes from the book series, specifically The Book of Ti'Ana, which IIRC is the second book in a trilogy. I haven't played more than the first one and a little bit of 3 tho. Always wanted to play Riven after reading the books, since they all take place right before the events of that game. But the book series and the games were written by the same people, so it's all the same lore.
Riven is great, probably my favorite in the series. You should definitely play it as soon as you get the chance.
But I think you're a bit off the mark with descriptive books. It's not VR, it's a teleporter. When you write an Age in a book, you're not creating it, you're describing it. When the book is detailed enough, it opens a portal to an existing world that matches your description.
It's pretty explicitly based on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, with infinite worlds lying on The Great Tree of Possibilities.
This is reinforced by a few details:
You can't write contradictions into an Age. The book will try to link to a world that matches your description, but that world is going to be extremely unstable if it works at all.
Altering a descriptive book is very risky. You can write changes after you've been to an Age assuming you've never observed anything that would contradict the change(the idea being that the waveform of possibility is still a bit in flux concerning details not previously mentioned), but it's very difficult to pull off and you need to be really really good at writing books to not break something.
It's generally a bad idea to try to write technology into an Age. Yeah infinite worlds, but artificial features are so specific you have difficulty finding a good match
Good to know I'll have to check the series out, thanks