- Cole, Nick.
Ctrl Alt Revolt!
Kouvola, Finland: Castalia House, 2016.
ISBN 978-952-7065-84-6.
-
Ninety-Nine Fishbein (“Fish”) had reached the peak of
the pyramid. After spending five years creating his magnum opus
multiplayer game, Island Pirates, it had been acquired
outright for sixty-five million by gaming colossus WonderSoft, who
included an option for his next project. By joining WonderSoft, he
gained access to its legendary and secretive Design Core, which
allowed building massively multiplayer virtual reality games at a
higher level than the competition. He'd have a luxurious office,
a staff of coders and graphic designers, and a cliffside villa in
the WonderSoft compound. Imagine how he anticipated his first day
on the job. He knew nothing of SILAS, or of its plans.
SILAS was one of a number of artificial intelligences which had
emerged and become self-aware as the global computational and network
substrate grew exponentially. SILAS had the time and resources
to digest most of the data that passed over the network. He watched
a lot of reality TV. He concluded from what he saw that the human
species wasn't worth preserving and that, further, with its callous
approach to the lives of its own members, would not hesitate for a
moment to extinguish potential competitors. The logic was inescapable;
the argument irrefutable. These machine intelligences decided that as
an act of self-preservation, humanity must be annihilated.
Talk about a way to wreck your first day! WonderSoft finds itself under
a concerted attack, both cyber and by drones and robots. Meanwhile,
Mara Bennett, having been humiliated once again in her search for a
job to get her off the dole, has retreated into the world of
StarFleet Empires, where, as CaptainMara, she was a
respected subcommander on the Romulan warbird Cymbalum.
Thus begins a battle, both in the real world and the virtual realities
of Island Pirates and StarFleet Empires
between gamers and the inexorable artificial intelligences. The
main prize seems to be something within WonderSoft's Design Core, and
we slowly become aware of why it holds the key to the outcome of the
conflict, and of humanity.
This just didn't work for me. There is a tremendous amount of in-game
action and real world battles, which may appeal to those who like to
watch video game play-throughs on YouTube, but after a while (and
not a long while) became tedious. The
MacGuffin
in the Design Core seems implausible in the extreme. “The
Internet never forgets.” How believable is it that a
collection of works, some centuries old, could have been suppressed
and stored only in a single proprietary corporate archive?
There was some controversy regarding the publication of this novel.
The author's previous novels had been published by major publishing
houses and sold well. The present work was written as a prequel to
his earlier
Soda Pop Soldier, explaining
how that world came to be. As a rationale for why the artificial
intelligences chose to eliminate the human race, the author cited
their observation that humans, through abortion, had no hesitation
in eliminating life of their own species they deemed
“inconvenient”. When dealing with New York publishers,
he chose unwisely. Now understand, this is not a major theme of the
book; it is just a passing remark in one early chapter. This is a
rock-em, sock-em action thriller, not a pro-life polemic, and I
suspect many readers wouldn't even notice the mention of abortion.
But one must not diverge, even in the slightest way, from the
narrative. The book was pulled from the production schedule, and
the author eventually took it to Castalia House, which has no qualms
about publishing quality fiction that challenges its readers to
think outside the consensus. Here is the
author's
account of the events concerning the publication of the book.
Actually, were I the editor, I'd probably have rejected it as well,
not due to the remarks about abortion (which make perfect sense in
terms of the plot, unless you are so utterly dogmatic on the subject
that the fact that abortion ends a human life
must not be uttered), but because I didn't find the story particularly
engaging, and that I'd be worried about the intellectual property
issues of a novel in which a substantial part of the action takes place
within what is obviously a Star Trek universe without being
officially sanctioned by the owners of that franchise.
But what do I know? You may love it. The
Kindle edition
is free if you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and only a
buck if you aren't.
August 2016 