The Bash Bash Revolution

March 1, 2018

Gr 8 Up-Seventeen-year-old high school dropout Matthew Munson lives a low-key life between playing the popular video game Bash Bash Revolution and meet-ups with his religious girlfriend Sally at the local Dairy Queen. But then his father Jeffrey Munson, who has been a very sporadic presence, returns with an AI machine he's been working on with the U.S. government. Although his motives are sometimes questionable, the father insists on bonding with his son over video games. Jeffrey becomes quite good at Bash Bash Revolution, even better than his son, and enters a local gaming tournament. Then, just as father and son seem to be connecting, Jeffrey disappears once again, encouraging Matthew to investigate his father's whereabouts, as well as the AI machine. Bearing similarities to M.T. Anderson's Feed, this timely novel explores the affordances and pitfalls of connecting and changing the world with technology. VERDICT Recommended for most YA shelves.-Margaret A. Robbins, University of Georgia, Athens

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
Lain (Last Week's Apocalypse, 2006) presents an ominous, cautionary AI dystopia that has much in common with Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It is 2017, and Matthew's dad has suddenly returned after a decade working for the NSA on perfecting an AI known as Bucky. As the real world unravels, Matthew is recruited by his father to teach him the video game BASH BASH Revolution as a way to work on perfecting Bucky. The book is told mostly in flashbacks, as Matthew DMs his girlfriendwith a few unsettling interruptions from Buckycalmly explaining how the world has become overrun with zombie-like VR goggle-wearing gamers. Intensely urgent and terrifying, Matthew's voice easily relates the hypertechnical details while entertainingly unraveling the plot. It is a fun readthat is, until you close the book and start thinking about its implications. This is not a cartoonish sketch: it is a realistic and bleak look at the post-singularity world. An easy suggestion for fans of current, accessible science fiction that thoughtfully contemplates AI, such as Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011) or C. Robert Cargill's Sea of Rust (2017), but it is also a great choice for those who enjoy John Scalzi's narrative style.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)