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   Second Life is an online community that allows not only chat but allows users to be represented in a three dimensional world by a three dimensional avatar. In this virtual realm, the avatar citizens have built an entire world of user created content that includes shopping malls, suburbs, nightclubs with live music as well as areas for wargames and re-creations of historical sites from around the world. Numerous educational organizations have established virtual classrooms with students gathering from different continents for online classes are taught by virtual professors.

    Second Life has become a worldwide platform for a vibrant arts community that includes musicians, painters, sculptors, graphic artists, writers, poets and actors. The medium of virtual reality gives artists a space where they can create any object they imagine out of thin air. As a writer, it allows me to attend writing seminars and other literary events taking place in other countries. I get to meet with published authors, publishers and agents in three-dimensional cities built by the writing community.

     My avatar in Second Life, Mariner Trilling, earns his virtual money by writing freelance for virtual-reality newspapers and magazines covering arts and events. A Google search of the name, “Mariner Trilling” will turn up theater reviews, comedy pieces and commentary from the virtual world.

This strange, eclectic anthology is set in a world rising from a few empty computer servers. In an existence bound only by imagination, an era of lawlessness gripped the early days of virtual reality as its inhabitants struggled to build a civilization. Hate groups, prostitution of child avatars, cyber weapons, computer hackers and financial fraud found hiding places in the legal grey area of an existence with no physical reality.