Ready Player One (2011)

I am exactly the right age to be the target audience for this novel rife with allusions and outright homages to the eighties and the semi-enduring pop-culture of the time. For a normal person who grew up in the late seventies and eighties, just about everything in this dystopian novel will be nostalgia fueled. But I'm nothing if not abnormal. I watched very little tv growing up. The only video games I ever played were Pacman and Frogger and neither one of them captured me for more than a handful of games total. I didn't see the movies of the day (as a matter of fact, my husband, shortly after we were married, made me go through a marathon of eighties movie watching so I'd have at least a smidgeon of the same cultural knowledge references as he does although I maintain they didn't stand the test of time very well). And so this science fiction novel was destined to miss the mark with me. But I wanted to give it a chance when my book club chose to read it for our yearly sci-fi/fantasy choice and I liked it better than I expected (low expectations helped oodles here) but not nearly as much as everyone else seemed to.

Thirty some years from now we have trashed our planet and life is grim for most people. With such an unpleasant reality, many people have retreated almost entirely into a utopian virtual reality world called OASIS, a kind of combination of massive multi-player online game like World of Warcraft, Facebook game apps, and advanced social media. OASIS has become more than just an escape from the famines, wars, poverty, and all other social ills; for some, OASIS has become a quest on a par with the search for the Holy Grail. Just prior to the opening of the novel, the creator of this alternate reality died and left his massive fortune to the first person to collect, unlock, and successfully navigate the tasks behind three special, hidden gates in this gigantic, utopian world.

Wade Watts is a high school senior living with his aunt and her nasty boyfriend, both of whom begrudge him the living space. So he finds his own hidden and secure space in the cab of a car buried beneath a tower of other junk. He is obsessed with finding the "Easter eggs" that James Halliday buried in the game, proudly naming himself a serious "gunter" or egg hunter. But he, like everyone else, has been unsuccessful for the five years since Halliday's death despite becoming expert in 80s trivia and pop culture as he tries to decipher the very first clue to the whereabouts of the first key. When he does finally crack the code and retrieve the key, he is the first person to do so but is quickly matched by several other gunters and the large corporation hell bent on finding the eggs so it can take over control not only of Halliday's fortune but also of OASIS itself.

Wade, who goes by the avatar name of Parzival in the OASIS world, makes virtual connections with his best friend Aech, a blogger named Art3mis with whom he is more than a little in love despite never having met her in the physical world, and two Japanese brothers Daito and Shoto. And although all of these characters, anti-social geeks huddled in their solitary lives, are essentially hunting on their own, they forge a tentative allied nerd herd when faced with the corporate bullying tactics of IOI and their willingness to kill for ultimate control of the game. But Wade is the main focus of the narration and it is his hunt and experiences through the games and movies of the 80s which so captured the imagination of Halliday that the reader follows, all the while knowing the ultimate outcome.

Because Cline spent so much time describing OASIS, it takes a very, very long time, 150 pages or so, before any sort of real action takes place but once it does, the plot becomes entirely a quest plot. This means the story as a whole is in actuality fairly thin, especially when much of the description is of the nostalgia inducing movies, video games, comics, and music which should already be familiar to those who lived through the era (unless they are like me and lived in a bubble). The baddies, called the Sixers, working for IOI are sinister but fairly incompetent, enabling our hero to prevail in every instance, despite his own occasional ineptitudes. The dialogue between the characters is stilted and unrealistic and it is clear that these are people unused to other people, content in their isolation, which perhaps is the big take-away from the novel. We are becoming too reliant on our technologies to the detriment of real social interaction. Living in virtual worlds may be an escape but it can also blind us to connection and to the bigger issues on which we need to focus. Everything about this novel screams movie script although with such reliance on earlier pop culture, the permissions costs to make this faithful to the novel will be steep indeed. For those who lived through the 80s, and specifically boys who lived through the 80s, this will be a grand ride. For others like me, or including those for whom the 80s are ancient, this will probably not wear as well. ( )

I probably would never have noticed this book had it not been recommended by a friend. He suggested it to me based on my love of '80s music, movies, books, and video games. And I'm glad he did make the recommendation. I found the book slow at first and I wasn't sure what I thought of it for the first 20% or so. I wish the author had done a better job of finding a way to include a bit of action or at least forward movement in the plot; instead, much of the first part of the book is devoted to trying to describe the universe that the author has created as the centerpiece of the story. But once things got moving, then this book turned out to be excellent. Cline really does a nice job of making virtual reality and the videogames that are important to the story come alive.

And just to brag a little, I was able to solve (all by myself!) half of two of the puzzles at the center of the story. Yes, I did pat myself on the back for that. ( )

Nerd orgasm.

Every person who has ever played a video game and thought "how great would this be if I could actually be IN this game?"; every person who has ever thought that moving in with their favorite sit-com family would be preferable to the real world; every person who has ever memorized a beloved movie: This is the book you have been waiting for all your life.

Although I'm probably five years too young to get the full impact of the 1980s pop/nerd-culture love-fest celebrated in this novel, I was aware of enough of the 80s that I was familiar with nearly every reference (excepting the music references), and cheered happily when several of them popped up in the story.

I occasionally had some suspension of disbelief issues with the various ways in which the OASIS functions. I have not played World of Warcraft of any of the other MMORPGs that might be most comparable to the OASIS, but with the experience I do have in online gaming, I was occasionally baffled by the way things like the in-game economy worked, the way in-game travel worked, and the complete inability of other players to track or locate each other in-game. And you may have seen my in-progress notes regarding my distress over when Wade used the bathroom. (Though I guess comments in the Pac Man bit clarified that somewhat.) None of this was really detrimental to my enjoyment of the story, however.

What really baffled me about the story was that for Huge Corporate Douchebag Monsters, the folks at IOI were completely incompetent. How was it possible for Wade to hack into IOI and screw them over royally, but the best IOI could do to screw him over was bribe his high school principal? How could they not be better at hacking than he was? Was the security of the OASIS really that impregnable? Are the people that run the OASIS really that un-corrupt?

So there's my only plot beef. I loved everything else. Loved it. Loved loved loved. I was thinking about this book when I couldn't read it. I even dreamed about it a few times.

I liked the characters a lot. I liked how they had to work for their accomplishments. So many new novels these days feature protagonists who discover, out of the blue, that they are Special and must learn to cope with whatever plot complications that creates. But they are not special. They are boring people with undeserved special powers. Wade was an interesting guy with a life and a story and a passion, and his dedication to his passion was everything in this story. He achieves what he does because he worked for it. Same with the other characters.

I can't help but wonder if the awesomeness of this book will fade over time. (Not for me. For future audiences.) The target audience is currently about 30 - 50 years old, I suspect. Maybe 30 - 60. And maybe you get some of the younger folks in because even though the 1980s references will be mostly lost on them, video game culture is huge right now, and this novel still plays very strongly to that interest group. But right now, in this decade in my age bracket, I thought this was just about the perfect storm of awesome. ( )

Fun video-game sci-fi in a 1980's virtual world. ( )

Loved it! Story is probably 4 stars, but I'm bumping it to 5 because it had that extra something special that made it un-put-down-able for me. It wasn't even the 80's references that got me. I didn't even get many of them. I grew up in the 80's, but I was a girl... So yeah... My Little Ponies and Barbies, crimped hair and neon clothes, big poofy bangs and lots of hair spray, those were my things. The references in this book? Boy stuff for sure. To be honest, that's one of the reasons I put off starting this one for so long. I just am not that into the 80's, and I kind of thought that's all it was.

But it's not. The references are just the frosting on the delicious cakey story. It was fun, interesting, a wild ride. I didn't want to have to put it down once I started reading it, I easily could have stayed up all night reading it a couple times, but alas.. Work. Boo.

Anyway.. This was awesome. Geekery at it's finest. Loved it. 5 stars. ( )