A Dream of Wessex, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 9)
This is the motherlode of all brains-in-jars/life-is-a-computer-simulation-type stories. Gibson’s and the Wachowski’s Matrixes can both trace their origins back to here – or at least, they should be able to. I’m not aware of anything older than this that quite deals with this idea. At Maiden Castle in Dorchester in …