This paper examines how three contemporary novels : Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021), Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me (2019), and Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013) dramatize the confusion between authentic experience and technologically constructed illusion. Borrowing the Sanskrit term māyā, the Vedantic concept of a veiling, world-generating illusion that conceals an underlying reality, alongside Jean Baudrillard's postmodern theory of simulacra and hyperreality, the paper argues that these novels trace a spectrum of what it terms digital māyā: from the private, spontaneous mysticism of an artificial mind in Klara and the Sun, through the exposure of human self-deception by an artificial being incapable of lying in Machines Like Me, to the corporate manufacture of illusion at civilizational scale in The Circle. Drawing on scholarship in posthumanism, artificial intelligence ethics, and surveillance theory, the analysis shows that unlike the classical Vedantic promise of liberation through recognition of illusion, these narratives offer no comparably secure path out of the veils their technologies generate. The comparative reading suggests that contemporary fiction's anxiety about artificial intelligence and digital mediation is not a single, uniform fear but a layered one, differing according to where, and at what scale, illusion is produced and consumed.

Dr. Shipra Malik,"Digital Māyā: Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Illusion in Contemporary Fiction" International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research and Educational Development, V2(5): Page(73-79) September - October 2026. ISSN: 3107-6513. www.ijamred.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.