This is an early passage from science fiction author Greg Egan‘s new novel, Schild’s Ladder (Eos/HarperCollins):
As she entered the chamber, she seemed to emerge from the mouth of a burrow to float above a lush, wide meadow beneath a cloud-dappled sky. The illusion was purely audiovisual — the sounds encoded in radio waves — but with no weight to hold her against the ceramic hidden beneath the meadow, the force of detail was eerily compelling. It took only a few blades of grass and some chirping insects to make her half-believe that she could smell the late-summer air.The setup is too complex to do justice, but suffice to say that the character described here finds herself adjusting to an artificial environment hundreds of light years from her home on Earth.