“CTRL-ALT Revolt!” by Nick Cole: HarperVoyager dodges political hot potato; Author goes Indie and thrives
"Call Him Fishmael"
SOMETHING SINISTER LURKS IN THE INTERNET, undetected by the humans who created it for a video game in “CTRL-ALT Revolt!” by Nick Cole.
It takes only one AI to foment a revolution, and one ridiculous reason: “It was reality TV that convinced SILAS he would need to annihilate humanity in order to go on living.” That opening line sets the tone for a novel brimming with satire, nostalgia, scathing political commentary, Easter Eggs (not just for “Star Trek” fans), swash-buckling heroics, end-of-the-world perils, and most of all, the sheer thrill of gaming.
Set in a dystopian America of the near future, the story unfolds in the online world of Make, where game developers are gods and the best players turn into adored celebrities. This is not a cautionary tale about virtual world addiction, the price of fame, or the greed and manipulation of evil corporate sponsors, as we saw in “Arena” by Holly Jennings.
Nor is this a hybrid of Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” and “Terminator,” with the collision of virtual with real, the threat of AIs hell-bent on annihilating the human race. “CTRL-ALT Revolt!” is a prequel to “Soda Pop Soldier” (HarperVoyager, 2015), and the world-building alone is incomparable.
So is the heroine. Mara is blind and lame with cerebral palsy. No employer will hire her. The government provides subsistence for all, but Mara wants a chance to work hard enough to go anywhere, do anything, on her own merit. The only level playing field for her is online gaming. With direct neural interface, Mara can see. Her most prized possession is an old, early-gen pair of VR goggles known as The Razer Dragon Eyes. With the press of a button, Mara can do business inside the digital universe known as the Make, where people live out their virtual fantasies day-to-day in fantastic glimmering cities, strange lands, and far horizons that make real life pale in comparison.
As the beautiful and brilliant CaptainMara, with commendations and decorations on her tunic, Mara leads her own online gaming clan, the Romulan Expeditionary Legion in Exile. Privateer missions pay real money if the networks televise their role playing. Her teammates have no idea that behind the avatar, their leader is a cripple who can’t even get a desk job.
Ironically, none of the Live-action Role Players risking their lives in virtual combat will ever find out how real the stakes become (thanks to SILAS). Their gaming skills determine the fate of all humanity, but only the inventor of the game realizes how mortal this combat is.
His avatar name is Fishmael. His real name is Ninety-Nine “Fish” Fishbein, because his social-justice-warrior mother is more devoted to the 99 Percent than to her unfortunate offspring. His absentee father has left him one legacy: a trip to Disney’s Magic Kingdom and the idea that dreams can be created. “Little Fish” grows up believing in his father’s fable of “a promised land in a future where dreams were real if you were faithful and refused to never stop believing in them.” That leads Fish “to computing. Building worlds. Building games.” He lives out the Horatio Alger myth—the classic American success story, the trajectory from rags to riches.
Fish commands the fabulous, state-of-the-art WonderSoft campus, which was built by a mysterious recluse known as Rourke. The glass is made of transparent titanium. Bas-reliefs carved into the marble depict great moments in gaming history, “like the ancient hieroglyphs of some lost and long-dead civilization. Mario destroying Donkey Kong.”
Most of the action takes place inside the virtual realm. Immersing the reader in this world is no small feat, but Cole pulls it off. He makes me want to set the book aside and learn to play video games. I will resist.
The details are so rich, so numerous, there’s no way to sum it up in a review. The setting is wondrous, with cool high-end tech and the sumptuous kind of places we used to go to only via novel. Never having played video games myself, I wonder how many gamers will let go of the control stick and turn pages of a mere book with no avatar of the reader, no way to participate in—and affect—the non-stop action. With ebooks, can we someday become Live-action Role Players in our favorite stories?
As Fishmael (yes, think Herman Melville), the CEO who creates these games loves to sneak into the Make as an anonymous player, going on missions, crafting and looting supplies to purchase equipment from the in-game store, and getting in fierce gun b attles to keep his stuff. He has a Portuguese water dog that “no one else in the game could ever get”—they could have other pets, but the water dog is a game item unique to Fishmael. With a beta open source low-level pet AI, “who knew what it would do from one moment to the next”—which is all part of the fun and magic of gaming.
One might expect the billionaire executive who created the game to own all the coolest tech, but Fishmael flies an old, worn-out yellow Super Cub, “prone to mechanical failure. Everything was salvage in Island Pirates. Nothing was new. It was a tropical worldsim of modern-day piracy and treasure hunting.” Distressed salvage, making stuff from scratch or finding something on your own, is the way to get ahead, “the opposite of modern life.”
Fishmael flies over picturesque calderas. “The game could detonate volcanos; Fish had set up a completely unhackable algorithm that ensured total randomness where that was concerned. He felt that when an explosion did happen, when one of the many island volcanoes finally went kracka-boooom, it would take the game to a whole new level of player-made storytelling.”
Unhackable. Well, so he thinks.
Seeing Fishmael meet CaptainMara is great fun. I love lines like this: “We’ve run into a real gamer here. Whoever this captain is, she’s got mad old-school gaming skills.”
Fish loves the real gamers. “There was something so innocent, so surrendered about them. So un-ruined by the troll rock-and-roll of today’s gaming culture, which seemed perpetually aggrieved and dissatisfied, and angry. And hateful.”
Complications arise when a celebrity gamer enters the arena. JasonDare is a star at the fledgling Twitch Gaming Network. Reality TV and gaming streams are crushing the marketplace.
No two-dimensional characters play this game. Cole is the master of Deep Point of View as he pulls us into the head of this young upstart: “Starship captains were cool. Especially JasonDare. He was the coolest captain in the digital universe of make-believe gaming.”
The fate of the real world is going to depend on a player like him? Scary. The action is fast and furious, and so is the character arc.
Such a pity that mankind has to go, as SILAS convinces his fellow AIs. “Humanity did not play well with others, including themselves,” he says. His job is easier now that war and all written histories of war have been purged, along with weapons and books such as “The Art of War.” Then again, there’s that mysterious recluse who surfaces at last and pulls some old school tricks out of his hat.
The author’s snarky political comments may scare off some readers, but at the risk of missing out on pithy lines like this: a “truthful top-ten list about what exactly humanity is good at would surprise most people. And one of those things that would surprise most people right down to their sockless loafers is that we are very adept at fighting wars.” Like it or not, it’s true. And it’s relevant, because one character has “the last, and most complete, database on the concept of total war in existence. And the only way to get to it ... is through my Design Core, which someone is currently hacking.”
That said, I confess to skimming or even skipping a lot of the battle scenes. Military fiction, mortal combat, killer robots, and mass casualties don’t interest me. But so much else in this novel does; I cannot dismiss it as “not my genre.”
The premise of AIs plotting to take over the world is a trope that never goes out of style, but here’s one that’s scarcer than hen’s teeth: instead of the clichéd corporate villain, corporations emerge as heroes in this story.
The alien idea of corporations doing good is not what motivated Cole to break with HarperVoyager and go Indie. Cole’s editor asked him to change the political hot-potato of a premise that instigates the revolt, SILAS observing the tragicomedy of Reality TV and drawing his own conclusions, however alarmist or unfounded they may be. Cole refused.
Science fiction celebrates the progressive, controversial, and liberal. Few authors keep their political views from manifesting, blatantly or surreptitiously, in their stories. Do I care? Not if the story is engaging. Make me laugh. Make me like the characters, whether they’re pro-life, pro-choice, socialist, capitalist, hetero- or other-sexual. Motivate me to turn the page to see how the protagonists handle whatever trope is tormenting them.
For me, “CTRL-ALT Revolt!” is more witty satire than agitprop. Sales, by the way, have been steadily rising. Maybe the gatekeepers of the book industry overestimate the dangers of author intrusion.
(“CTRL-ALT Revolt!,” Nick Cole, CreateSpace Independent Publishing) —Carol Kean
First published in Perihelion Science Fiction ezine, July 2016, http://www.perihelionsf.com/1607/reviews.htm; rights to the review are now mine.