Review: The Cyber War is On
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 15, 2011
Wimpress's novel is a patchwork of plot, people, and an innovative writing style that, under the author's guiding hand, coheres into a fully believable, thoroughly chilling image of the near future.  Chris Wimpress wrote that Joe is Online takes place where the offline and online worlds meet, and he's exactly right.  We're living in a time when our physical existence is getting more and more entangled in the virtual web of the World Wide Web--and, for better or worse, would have a pretty damn hard time getting along without it.  The world of Joe is Online is a speculative one, sure, where timid academics join up with radical tele-atheists to fight a growing cyber-terrorist cult (for more information on how to get involved, contact joe@theintercession.org).  But it's our world too, and even more unnerving for that fact.Joe is Online is about 5,000 Kindle locations--average novel length, but epic in scope.  We start way back in the dark ages (the late 1990s), following an angry young boy named (guess who?) Joe, who might not have grown up to be a computer-hacking terrorist leader if he'd had more adults like the encouraging elementary school art teacher in his life.  In a secret .doc diary, Joe lets us know that he's playing what his history teacher calls "the long game" (and what LOST fans call "the long con").  And he means it.  Joe grows up fast online, and becomes a cyber-cult leader so persuasive that, seriously, even I started getting sucked into his propagandistic emails.It's a testament to the author's brilliant writing.  Chris Wimpress's skill in creating a compelling story from these emails and chat log snippets is nothing less than masterful.  Without an omniscient narrator telling us what our villains and heroines are thinking, a less adept author might end up with flat characters and a jagged narrative flow.  Luckily for the reader, Joe is Online gives us depth in characters such as the love-torn professor Penelope, and veiled mystery in our titular antagonist Joe (part of the fun is trying to figure out if our Dear Leader really believes what he's saying, or is just as cynical as the middle-school hacker we first meet).Similar to... Robert J. Sawyer (FlashForward), Walter Jon Williams (This Is Not A Game), David Louis Edelman (Infoquake)