Imagine being trapped in a zone of potential existence. Imagine wandering a limitless cyberspace library filled with possible realities. Somewhere in the infinite expanse of books lies your true identity, your real life. Helpful librarians point you to stories that seem to be about you and you try them on for size, ultimately realizing each is false. But from each story you get a clue that leads you closer to your personal book, your true story, the one which will allow you to finally escape the library into life.

Visually the Library is an architectural wonder, part gothic, part futurist: a vast labyrinth of identical hexagonal bookshelves, spiral stairways, air shafts and glittering control panels in unfathomable space. The Library is the depository of all the world's knowledge and history in all languages. In it are books from antiquity to modern times, containing true, as well as, false information duly recorded by the Librarians, seemingly kind and helpful custodians who inhabit narrow "sleep closets” at the entrance to each hexagon.

The Librarians watch as virtual beings wander like phantoms through the towering stacks, floating from level to distant level in search of the one book that holds their true identity, their true life story. The sheer vastness of the Library makes the phantoms' task seem impossible and it may well be that most of them have given up trying to find their real book at all.

Not so for John Pierce, the hero of the series. He is one phantom who is out to defy the virtual system of the Library, a man on a quest to find himself in the real world.