Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

Published by Arrow Books: London, England, 2012 (2011).

A book I've heard a lot about, but one that I've neither read nor seen the movie version of before now. 

Ready Player One is set in a fairly dystopian near-future. The environment is in serious trouble, many people live in trailer park 'stacks' (where mobile homes are piled up on top of each other to save space), currencies are unstable, and crime is high. Is it any wonder, then, that people long to escape their world into the OASIS, an online virtual reality world that is far more appealing than the 'real' world they live in? Our protagonist, Wade Watts, is just such an individual. He is an 18-year old 'gunter' (egg-hunter), searching the OASIS for 'easter eggs' left by James Halliday, the now-deceased creator of the OASIS. The first person to successfully unravel the cryptic notes left by Halliday, finding three keys and using them to unlock three gates - and complete the challenges surrounding each of these - will inherit Halliday's entire fortune, and with it control of the OASIS itself.

A great set-up, and a fairly enjoyable story overall. Halliday was obsessed with '80s pop-culture, so there are countless references to songs, movies, and video games from that era and beyond. As a gunter, Watts has devoted himself to mastering every game and learning every song lyric or movie quote that Halliday loved, and the love for these pop-culture touchstones comes through on every page, as well as enabling him to overcome most of the challenges he faces with comparative ease. This is one of the (admittedly minor) problems of the story as well - Watts needs to be proficient in '80s pop culture in order to succeed on his quest, but in being so, much of the tension is removed. Watts will face a challenge and state something like: "I'd seen WarGames so many times that I knew the entire film by heart...If all I had to do was rattle off lines of dialogue from WarGames on cue for the next two hours, this was going to be a breeze." (page 109-110) This can also make him seem a little arrogant at times.

Aside from this, the main negatives for me in the book are tied to Watts' beliefs. He is a firm atheist (like Halliday) and fairly dismissive of religion. This isn't 'offensive' to me, but is just a little bit sad (though this element does feed into a plot point later in the book). There is also occasional language and coarseness, with certain actions that Watts takes feeling a little unnecessary to reference. As these elements are not main parts of the story, they don't detract from the book as a whole, but I would have enjoyed it even more had they not been a part of it, and they could have easily been done away with.

Completed 12 January 2022.

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