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No Man's Sky came out in August 2016 as one of the most hyped games ever made, and within weeks it was the internet's favourite villain. Ten years and dozens of free updates later, it's often told as a redemption story. This book takes both stories seriously, and then sets them inside a much older one: people have been imagining other worlds since Lucian sent a ship to the Moon, and arguing about whether there could be many of them since the atomists. Bruno, Leibniz, Borges and the 8-bit space game Elite all turn up, along with Sol LeWitt's wall drawings and some hard thinking about what a trailer actually promises.
The second half asks what a computed universe does to old ideas. Can ten thousand variations on a planet still surprise you? What does it mean to discover a world nobody designed, or to name a species no one will ever see again? Who owns a planet that a program made and a player built a home on, under UK copyright law? And what's lost when an update quietly rewrites the place you'd settled? The facts are as they stood in November 2026.
No Man's Sky came out in August 2016 as one of the most hyped games ever made, and within weeks it was the internet's favourite villain. Ten years and dozens of free updates later, it's often told as a redemption story. This book takes both stories seriously, and then sets them inside a much older one: people have been imagining other worlds since Lucian sent a ship to the Moon, and arguing about whether there could be many of them since the atomists. Bruno, Leibniz, Borges and the 8-bit space game Elite all turn up, along with Sol LeWitt's wall drawings and some hard thinking about what a trailer actually promises.
The second half asks what a computed universe does to old ideas. Can ten thousand variations on a planet still surprise you? What does it mean to discover a world nobody designed, or to name a species no one will ever see again? Who owns a planet that a program made and a player built a home on, under UK copyright law? And what's lost when an update quietly rewrites the place you'd settled? The facts are as they stood in November 2026.