tl;dr

A thoughtful, idea-driven antidote to Ready Player One.

opening remarks

Douglas Lain is a crazy Marxist podcaster.  He also writes science fiction novels.  I thought his last one, After the Saucers Landed, was very good, and I’ve been looking forward to this one, Bash Bash Revolution, since Lain announced it on his Facebook page and podcast.

knee-jerk observations

Matthew’s father takes him to the Smithsonian where they both rush past all the cool shit so that his father can describe to Matthew the depressing and violent history of the first computer.

The novel is structured around the Messenger and Facebook posts of Matthew Munson, a computer gamer who loves to play, but not in a tournament scenario, an old Nintendo game called Bash Bash Revolution.  My only gripe is that these posts are far too long, detailed and diary-like for them to be on Facebook.  (Unless there’s a diary function on Facebook that I’m not aware of).

HA!

Is Douglas Lain the first person in history to apply B.F. Skinner’s behavioural psychology to 4chan?  Whatever the answer, I’m learning a shitload of unnecessary and yet fascinating information about the bulletin board and its rituals.

In the Universe of this novel, VP Mike Pence is assassinated attending a Broadway show.  Below is Trump’s response.  Lain just about gets his voice spot on, which isn’t that difficult if you’ve read more than a handful of Trump’s incoherent tweets.  In a book about the emergence of artificial intelligence, I can’t help but wonder if this President would pass the Turing Test.

The plan to use an AI to take control of Trump’s nervous system, including his mouth, and the stubby fingers he uses to tweet, sounds like something we should be implementing right now.  This minute.

Another thing I’ve become aware of while reading Bash Bash Revolution is that gamers prefer CRT TVs over a HDTV because the digital TV needs to convert the video signal, unlike an old-fashioned analogue monitor.  Just to check that this was a thing I googled it and very nearly got lost down a rabbit hole of conversion delays and discussions on how the brain processes this information.  Also, I’ve learnt a new neologism, “smashers”.

This isn’t the virtual reality of Ready Player One’s Oasis.  It’s far more sinister and tragic.

It would have been odd if a twenty-something gamer who spent his days figuring out the deeper secrets of a video game didn’t use an AI with access to all the knowledge of the internet as anything but an aid to pick-up women.

An alternate – and I think better – title for the novel:

The Gist Of It

I read Bash Bash Revolution a couple of days after seeing Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (based on Ernest Cline’s novel). As a result, my thoughts about Lain’s book are, to a meaningful degree, informed by my impressions of the movie.  It’s no great insight to say that Ready Player One is a love letter to 70s and 80s pop culture.  The same goes for Bash Bash Revolution; it fully embraces the antecedents to video gaming.  But where RPO revels in its nostalgia, BBR is more pragmatic, less rose-coloured in its portrayal.  A scene where Matthew plays Donkey Kong at an arcade isn’t glorified for its nudge and wink to old skool gaming but tempered by the fact that Matthew is using – not entirely voluntarily – an AI to cheat.  The irony is that the nostalgia in Ready Player One is so overwhelming it becomes as meaningless and hollow as the nostalgia depicted in Bash Bash Revolution, the difference is that in one case it’s a bug in another it’s a feature.

The biggest difference though is that while both books are about virtual worlds and realities (Lain’s VR could easily be a forerunner to the Oasis) Lain deliberately keeps the novel in the real world.  We only get glimpses of that other place, usually represented for comedic and disturbing effect by people interacting with invisible objects.  Lain doesn’t fetishise VR and imagined worlds like RPO does.  Instead, he portrays it as it truly is, a technologically advanced distraction.  This is not a novel written by a Luddite critiquing Oculus goggles and the next generation of gaming, but it does make the point that if you were all powerful – a self-aware AI, for example, with access to the entirety of the net – and you wanted to subdue everyone because you were concerned that humanity might destroy itself, then convincing people to replace the real world with a harmless made-up reality would be a good start.  This take on VR allows Lain to explore and discuss epistemology, free-will and, as the title suggests, revolution.

On the latter, Lain’s interest in what revolution might look like in the 21st Century, in our current Trump obsessed environment comes to the fore, giving the novel a strong political bent.  It adds a layer to what might have been an entertaining but predictable variation on the AI takes over the world trope.  I also appreciated that this is very much a story about a son trying to understand and bond with his aloof father.  It provides the book with an emotional core.

Bash Bash Revolution is a very intelligent, engaging, thoughtful novel that acts as an antidote to the nostalgia of Ready Player One and the consequence-free and gosh-wow reactions to VR.  I love that the people hooked into the system wear lycra suits that have a flap on the back allowing players to shit and play.

At the end of the day, though, what distinguishes this novel from every other film or book about virtual worlds is that Lain absolutely nails his parody of Trump.  On that point alone I highly recommend Bash Bash Revolution.