CTRL ALT Revolt! (Unabridged‪)‬

Kudos to the author for sticking to their principles and keeping their original idea for the AI uprising. It’s more plausible than most.

This book is set in the near future, where machines have gained consciousness and arrive at the conclusion that men will destroy them if they were aware the machines could think. In order to preserve their existence, the machines decide to strike first and try to destroy humanity. In order to do this, they infiltrate a very famous online game.

The premise of this book was good enough to pique my curiosity, but the author failed to deliver, in my opinion. The novel, I feel personally, is much longer than it should be, and we are lost most of the time in meaningless details which distract our attention. Despite all this extraneous information, we know very little about the world in which the story takes place. There is a big corporation where every developer would love to work, and online games have gained a lot of popularity as being the only way for some people to pursue their dreams and make some real money.

The main characters of this story are Mara, a game player who is blind and has cerebral. There is also Fish, a developer that recently started to work for Wondersoft, the big software and gaming corporation mentioned before. We get a lot of background information about these two characters but there is still something missing to make them fully alive. The listener can almost connect with Mara but, in my opinion, is still lacking something in her character development to make her complete. In regards to Fish, except for his relationship with his father, we know very little about him. Due to this I had difficulties connecting with the characters and thus I did not care much for what it happened to them. The narration was hard to follow since the book is plagued with much trivial information which I feel adds little or nothing to the story, and made the narration distracting.

I should note, that the book is not really focused on the characters – the bigger story line is about the AI vs the humans, the battles and such. It is this reason why I think I didn’t enjoy the book as much and found it a difficult listen.

Mare Trevathan did a wonderful job narrating this story, making distinctive voices and really putting her heart in the narration. Her passion for reading is evident by how she immersed herself into the story. I would love to listen to other books narrated by her.

I think this book could be enjoyed by people who are into online gaming. I have to confess that the game descriptions were very well done and it even encouraged me to install a couple of online games, even though I am not a gamer.

This is not my favorite listen but I did find some enjoyable parts about it. Not being a gamer I think hindered me somewhat and perhaps my liking to connect with characters when it is obvious the characters are not the main focus of the book. This is unique and the author took a massive gamble with this writing style.

Audiobook was provided for review by the author.

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