Douglas Lain’s Bash Bash Revolution is an intelligent cyberpunk novel that comments — as cyberpunk novels tend to do — on the increasingly blurred line between reality and virtual reality in all of its forms. The narrative centers on a high-school dropout and semiprofessional gamer named Matthew Munson who watches somewhat helplessly as his world turns into a massive augmented reality arena almost overnight. Complicating matters is that his father is largely responsible for the shift. Further complicating matters is the looming threat of nuclear war. Even further complicating matters is the fact that Matthew has fallen in love for the first time in his life. As the complications pile up, the young gamer struggles not only to save the world from drifting inextricably into an artificial gameworld mediated by a computer program called Buckminster Fuller (“Bucky” to his friends), but also to consider the most foundational of existential questions: Does reality really exist? If so, what is it? And not to put too fine a point on it, but what’s so great about reality anyway?
Reading Bash Bash Revolution, one is reminded of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode titled “The Game” in which a sinister plot sees the crew of the Enterprise turned to zombies after becoming addicted to a video game. Indeed, one of the more moving passages in the novel has the young protagonist bearing witness to his once-upstanding socially-minded mother succumb to the pleasures of game play after only one hit. Upon physically breaking the connection between his mother and the computer that holds her in its thrall, the protagonist-narrator relates the following:
“Wow,” she said. “That was amazing. Really real.”
“You were totally zonked out,” I said. “You fainted.”
“I…” Mom was looking in my direction but not really meeting my eye. What she was looking at was my hand, the hand I was using to hold her phone. “Matthew,” she said. “I’d prefer you not play with my phone. I don’t want you to waste my data or my minutes.”
That’s really what she said. That’s what she was worried about, apparently. Her data plan was suddenly of the utmost importance, and she snapped her fingers at me and made me hand her phone over. She didn’t want to hear about it, she said. She didn’t care what the phone had just been doing to her… She just wanted her phone.
So I did as she asked.
Needless to say, the novel speaks not only to issues that we might face one day with respect to virtual and augmented realities, but also to present-day concerns regarding screen addiction and our tendency to prefer data over lived experience. Fittingly, then, the novel is not set in some not-too-far-off future but in the not-too-distant past — 2017, to be exact. As such, the cultural references are chillingly relevant, and even as Lain paints Donal Trump with a somewhat comical brush, the humor is dark, dry, and of a gallows variety.
Ultimately, Bash Bash Revolution is about programming and the many forms that it can take. Yes, there is computer programming, But, as Matthew at one point reflects, “Human beings have programmed themselves” as well; “they have given themselves goals and set up axioms in order to live. They have done and continue to do this individually… They have done and continue to do this collectively… But all the while, as human beings make themselves, they also hide from themselves, they hide how they make themselves from themselves. They refuse to take responsibility for how their world works.” Or, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
A page-turner with a strong philosophical bent, Bash Bash Revolution is up there with some of the best VR-influenced sci-fi of the past thirty years and will sit comfortably with works like Snow Crash and Ready Player One on any reader’s bookshelf, virtual or otherwise, for years to come.
Small Press Reviews 