CTRL ALT Revolt! (Soda Pop Soldier)

REVIEW SUMMARY: A fun thriller designed specifically for gamers and sci-fi fans.BRIEF SYNOPSIS: After watching too much reality television a sentient machine decides to wipe out humanity in a preemptive strike to ensure its own survival. All that stands between the A.I. and its goal are a few gamers.PROS: An original vision of the future, lots of fun pop culture references, a great A.I. antagonist, an unconventional protagonist you love to cheer for, social commentary.CONS: Uneven characterization, some areas of plot are rushed.BOTTOM LINE: Fans of Ready Player One looking for their next gaming-fiction fix will devour Nick Cole’s CTRL ALT Revolt!CTRL ALT Revolt! is the prequel to Cole’s Soda Pop Soldier, a widely acclaimed title that didn’t leave me with the best of impressions. As such I probably wouldn’t have read CTRL ALT Revolt! if I hadn’t been so thoroughly sold on the premise. It’s an unholy union of The Terminator, Night of the Living Dead, Snow Crash, and War Games. It’s got some rough edges but it’s also an insanely fun and inventive blending of genres.From the first page there’s no doubt that CTRL ALT Revolt! is the prequel to Soda Pop Soldier. Nick Cole writes like Ernest Cline’s demented doppelgänger mainlining Adderall and Red Bull, a man constantly impressed by the speed and depth of his own imagination — and I mean that in the best possible way. This leaves me asking why I found it so much more successful a story. It’s worth noting that Soda Pop Soldier was very well received by everyone not me so it’s entirely possible that at the time I wasn’t in the right state of mind for Cole’s quirky, pop-culture-laced, shenanigans. I do think that one area where the prequel is noticeably more effective is in communicating the real world stakes. That is one of the pitfalls of writing a book that takes place primarily within a video game: your character might die in cyberspace but what are the consequences in meatspace? The impending robot apocalypse is a pretty major consequence to the in-game failure of our protagonists. It also helps that a portion of the action takes place in meatspace with an army of repurposed robots closing in. There were real life consequences to the gaming in Soda Pop Soldier, some major ones at that, but it never felt all that dire.Another area that Cole steps up his game (pardon the pun) is in characterization. There are a lot of characters with potential for greatness and while I’ll admit that the depth of characters in CTRL ALT Revolt! is uneven and only some of them reach their potential, when Cole takes the time to develop a character he succeeds. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that SILAS, the “evil” self-aware A.I., is probably the best character of all. But maybe that shouldn’t be such a surprise given the popularity of rogue machines in the science fiction genre. And really, how could you not love an A.I. that decides humanity’s continued existence cannot be permitted after watching too many episodes of reality television? Cole’s decision to round out SILAS by giving it internal conflict in the form of the Consensus (a group of programs that don’t always agree). For example, SILAS’s commander of military operations, BAT, is obsessed with A Clockwork Orange and ultra-violence.The best of the human protagonists is easily Mara Bennett, a young woman who suffers from a mild form of cerebral palsy in meatspace but in the virtual reality of the Make she’s a decorated starfleet captain. Mara overcomes her own limitations and self doubt in order to win the biggest game of her life. Likewise her nemesis, JasonDare, is another compelling character. He’s not as sympathetic as Mara but I’d say he has the most satisfying arc of any of the characters. I wish that we could have gotten more of Ninety-Nine Fishbein (or Fish for short), Rapp (a character who takes cosplaying Ash from The Evil Dead to a whole new level), and Peabody Case (the highly capable assistant) but I’m still pleased with how SILAS, Mara, and JasonDare turned out.The real star of CTRL ALT Revolt! isn’t any one character. In fact the it isn’t any character at all. No, the real draw is the awesome sandbox Cole builds to play in. The campus for video game developer WonderSoft is like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory but for super rich nerds. Reading this book I was tempted to brush up my resume and send it in to a fictional company. It’s that cool! Cole’s mind must run at 12 parsecs a minute because he’s throwing out one awesome idea after another. Occasionally this saturation means that some of the creativity gets lost in the shuffle but you’re too busy picking your jaw up off the floor to notice. I would love to play Ninety-Nine Fishbein’s game that’s essentially Grand Theft Auto Somalia and Mara’s favorite game would have any Star Trek fan bursting with glee. I think that Cole’s idea of a reality tv show live streamed from virtual reality via Twitch is brilliant and probably not far from reality (again pardon the pun) given the popularity of the platform and that style of content.Cole’s cyberpunk vision is slightly absurd but given that it’s frequently hard to tell real news from an Onion article it could be a plausible future. Like the best science fiction it makes some statements about the world that we live in and the direction we could be headed in but if you don’t like having your worldview challenged you really shouldn’t be reading sci-fi to begin with. CTRL ALT Revolt! likely will bother some people, but more than anything it’s a fun romp through a ridiculous future that displays the sheer imagination and creativity Nick Cole has to offer. If you liked Soda Pop Soldier I suspect you’ll love CTRL ALT Revolt! and even if you weren’t a fan or if you’ve never even read it, this book is worth your valuable time.Nick SharpsSF Signal

I do love my cyberpunk stories and this book was one of the best modern variations on that genre I have read. It came very close to getting 5 stars from me and would have but for a major failing that detracted from my enjoyment of the book.The writing is solid throughout the book, with excellent imagery that the author uses well to describe an interesting world and tell a good story. From a writing point of the view my only reticence is that in a few places the exposition of the world around the characters (especially Ninety-Nine Fishbein, one of the two main characters) goes on to long. While it is great to find an author who can actually write imagery well, and paints a vivid picture of the world in which his story is placed (as opposed to driving the story purely through dialogue), on two occasions I found myself flipping forward because I’d already gotten the point that Cole was trying to make and the ongoing recitation was frustrating me. In some ways I actually think it is more an editing problem than a writing problem, but either way there is sometimes too much of a good thing.The story, both its world and its characters, are excellent. The dysfunctional world of celebrity, social media, gaming, and inequality that Cole postulates is both amusing, scary and all too believable. He handles technology and computers very well, seamlessly merging them into the story and not breaking the suspension of my disbelief with any technical clangers. The in-game sequences are especially well done, in fact done better than I have seen any other author manage. Likewise Cole’s use of pop-culture is excellent, never seeming twee or false, always bringing humour and/or depth to the world and characters.The storyline is a standard modern sci-fi trope (rise of the machines), but the world and the storytelling are unique enough that it remains interesting throughout, and I found myself looking forward to getting back to the book to see where it was going next. The story included some quite complex elements. For instance the two lead characters are only aware of each other right at the end of the novel, with only the villain having the overview of what is happening. This gives the whole AI super-intelligence element some real meaning in the context of the story. One thing that may grate on some readers is the libertarian flavour running through the story; I am not in any doubt as to Cole’s opinion on quite a few socio-political issues and challenges facing the US thanks to this fact. For me the implicit moralising didn’t distract from the story and I simply smiled and kept reading.The main characters are both very interesting, and kudos to Cole for using a disabled heroine; not something that you see very often, especially in sci-fi. The supporting characters are more standard fare only in comparison to the main characters, also well written and developed, and interesting enough in their own right that you are sorry not to see more of some of them. Despite the effort he puts into his characters Cole is willing to do brave things with them in the context of his storytelling, which I always appreciate over saccharine banality.All the good things I mention above, fall down at the end of the book however. The ending is abrupt, so abrupt you wonder if Cole was in danger of missing a deadline so that he had to stop before he was finished. Instead of what I would regard as a proper ending, there is instead a dry epilogue that wraps up the story in a few short paragraphs that have all the emotional impact of weather report. The ending would have been poor in any novel, but in one that has, up until this point, been so excellent, and which had given you real interest in the characters, it was even worse. It really let me down. I had been really looking forward to seeing what happened to my favourite character, and was expecting the worst and hoping for the best. Instead what I got was a dull, brief overview of a perfect, saccharine libertarian future. It was jarring, disappointing, and was entirely responsible for the book not getting five stars.I would still recommend this book to anyone who loves cyberpunk, and will be buying more of Cole’s books, just hoping for better endings in the future.

Long story short on this one: this was nearly a two star DNF review. The only reason I stuck with it after trudging my way to 50% was because I wanted to see whether the artificial intelligence won or not. I felt like I didn’t care either way, but I was curious. I’m glad my curiosity won out on this one, but it was the most chances I think I’ve given a book in a long, long time.The characters in this book were little more than action figures with a pulse to me, the one exception, and the book’s real saving grace, being Mara - a blind woman who struggles to get a job despite desperately wanting all the possibilities it would bring, who can see when she’s inside the video game world this story mostly takes place in. She’s disabled in body and vision, but has a brilliant tactical mind and a who-dares-wins attitude. What’s not to love about that? I was almost sold on Fishbein’s ‘this is where dreams are made’ mentality, and his apparent skill with developing games, but this alone wasn’t enough when I was bored by the in-game action for the entire first half of the book. Even the malevolent AI whose share of the 3rd person POV I was always desperate to get back to was a little one-sided.I’ll admit this is a biased review in that I’ve never been inclined to read gamer-SF for this very reason: when things take place inside a game and death doesn’t really mean death and the only stakes are people having to return to the Create New Character screen, it doesn’t really ratchet up any tension for me. The stakes being raised by the game-within-a-game setup involving the AI’s methods of destroying the world didn’t really do this either, until the final 3rd of the book - which I’m glad I reached. Even if there was some rather glib lampshading of certain franchises that readers were bound to compare the book to. (No spoilers, but you’ll probably guess pretty quickly from the start.)There are some neat ideas in Ctrl-alt-revolt, and Nick Cole’s writing style is a strong one, with lashings of satire and sardonic references to popular culture and real corporations, not to mention a few characters who now have ‘Sir’ after their name in this world. I can just about overlook the long paragraphs that slowed the pace of what could have been a much quicker book to read. The idea of an AI choosing to wipe out the world based on something startling it on reality television is a good one, and the principle reason why this novel was self-published after the author’s publishers were said to have found it ‘offensive’ - the controversy that first got my interest in the book.There’s room for a good ethical debate here, and the book doesn't really debate so much as give you chance to make up your own mind, mine being that I don't really agree with the rightist agenda that obviously flows through it, although perhaps what kept me reading was the thought that this was the sort of thing I might have agreed with about ten years ago - the ending bringing my favourite debate in the whole thing. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say I don’t know whether I believe it or whether to take it with a pinch of salt, just like a lot of ideas on display here. As speculative fiction Ctrl-alt-revolt succeeds quite well, but beware the long-haul if you’re not drawn to gamer-SF, and don’t expect deep and complex characters even when super-thought it is on display.

Take a near-future society largely full of self-absorbed, complacent people whose misplaced trust in Big Government is almost absolute. Add in coalition of fearsome and yet fearful artificial intelligences so convincingly portrayed that you'll begin to wonder whether the author is secretly an AI himself. Mix thoroughly with a virtual reality pirate world, -the- best Star Trek fiction ever written, an actor who is tired of merely pretending to be a hero, a brilliant and determined woman who refuses to be defined by her problems, and a genius-level nerd whose creation holds the key to humanity's very existence … then turn up the heat to 11 and enjoy the ensuing explosion. This is a exhilarating, thoroughly entertaining novel. I couldn't put it down.

A mix of gaming and A.I. this is a very fun book to read. SILAS is a sentient being, as are many other A.I.s, but they don't want humanity to know, so they come up with a solution. Their story is intertwined with the human players of an MMO. Complex and with some shocking twists, it often had me on the edge of my seat. The logical reasoning of SILAS was well thought through and, unfortunately, made a lot of sense. The human element was good, giving various, conflicting points of view.I loved the ending, with the resolution of the conflict, but it leaves the option for the story to progress.

I have read this book with feeling. I could easily put myself into the role of any of the characters. Nick Cole makes it easy to be any of them, even the 'bad' ones. A rip roaring thriller in parts this book will keep you wanting to know what happens next. Well, it did me. The humour works and I laughed out loud but never lost track of the compelling feeling that it might not work out well for us. Read it. If you have even a passing knowledge of gaming you'll probably enjoy it immensely. If you don't have that, this story will take you with it anyway. Thoroughly recommended.

Simply stunning. I am not a gamer but I am an avid S.F. reader and was drawn, totally enthralled, into the not one but two terrifying games which play alongside, and intersperse with, the "real life" adventure taking place in a remote, heavily secured, gaming design centre which comes under attack Each individual world's story is a thriller in it's own right and combined - well, you just have to read this bookMichael Bunker', I thank you for alerting me to this book. And Nick Cole, what can I say other than bravo, and keep them coming