Review of When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory

Brain-in-a-vat is a common enough concept in science fiction. Do we exist in reality, or are our brains in vats attached to sensory stimuli simulating existence? The Matrix made a killing playing off this thought experiment. It features a main character who, after building a life, comes to learn his brain is in a vat—a battery for the machine gods. When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory (2025) posits something slightly different, a modern world scenario where everyone already knows they are living in a simulation. They know their brain is in a vat, no surprise, no red or blue pill. Gregory then takes a sharp social/psychological stick and begins poking this world (as if it needed it).

The frame of When We Were Real is a motley group of ~15 tourists taking a cross-country bus tour of 'impossibles'—flaws in their simulated reality. Stereotypes slowly coming to life, the group consists of four octogenarians, a pregnant influencer, a flat earther (he's not really a flat earther, but you get the vibe) and his teenage simp son, a brain cancer patient and his cartoonist best friend, an ageing, wheelchair-bound mother and her adult daughter, newly wed Austrians, a Chinese young lady, a researcher on the run, two nuns, a rabbi, their last minute-replacement tour guide, and the bus driver. Akin to video game glitches, the impossibles include invisible geysers, holes to the other side of the world, a 90-degree bend in reality, an atemporal tunnel, and so on.

But it's the tourists' personal stories which take center stage, and ultimately form the prime substance of the novel. Gregory interweaves their stories by rotating through perspectives, but each character realizes itself, providing its own impetus. In some cases, they become relatable humans, while in others reality is streeeeetched for dramatic effect. It can be said, however, that the character which provides the novel its denouement/epilogue is the one which hits the hardest: reality check.

And the conclusion is amazing, one of the best, most subtle I've encountered in a while. Throughout When We Were Real there is occasional discussion, and sometimes conflict, on the cosmology of their virtual world. Are they akin to people/characters with agency in a video game (the “Protagonists”), or perhaps this part of a repeating sim—an idea espoused by people calling themselves groundhog dayers. after the Bill Murray film. It's the conclusion of the novel which answers and doesn't answer questions around the setting's cosmology, doing so in wonderfully adroit fashion. No spoilers here, but I can say it asks readers to look in a different direction, one my agnostic heart swoons for.

If there are any challenges to the book, the main one is perhaps that Gregory gets a bit too deep into genre on occasion. I'm aware for some this is an advantage not a disadvantage, but the point is that conceptually and ideologically there is an immense amount of material that Gregory alludes to and indirectly raises questions about that provides more than enough substance for a novel. Slather on a touch of melodrama and add a spy thriller sub-plot and you create distraction from the real meat of the story. Again, the conclusion packs a punch, but it perhaps could have hit a little harder had Gregory reined in the proceedings.

In the end, When We Were Real is a novel for the times. Gregory delivers sharp prose and nice twists of phrase in presenting the jittery, suave, angtsy, grounded, egostistical—the spectrum of people we've come to perceive as normal in reality and online—chasing impossibles. Its success is these characters' actions and worldviews knowing they are part of a simulation, and the natural thoughts and questions that arise in the reader's mind while reading—not in the cheap Are we living in a simulation? sense, rather in the more realistic sense. How much of our own lives have become virtualized, i.e. partially real/quasi-real? How much of our perspectives are both opened and limited by spending so much time staring at a screen? How have our values evolved by co-existing with technology to a degree humanity never has before? Has what is important shifted? What distinguishes each of us from an NPC? And so on. I'm not sure this will end up as my novel of the year, but it's the best I've read so far in 2025.