Book Review : Ready Player One

It's not often you hear someone say 'Willy Wonka meets the Matrix', do you? But that's exactly what New York Times had to say about Ready Player One and this reviewer strongly echoes their views. Ernest Cline's debut book, one that explores love, war, greed and the overall decadence of humanity, is a truly interesting read.

Yep. The book cover is *that* intriguing.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. 


And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune--and remarkable power--to whoever can unlock them. 


For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday's riddles are based in the pop culture he loved--that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape from the real world, one which is falling apart primarily due to negligence, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday's icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes's oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig. 


And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle. 


Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt--among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life--and love--in the real world he's always been so desperate to escape. 


A world at stake. 
A quest for the ultimate prize. 

For most of the first half of this book, I was unimpressed. The writing is flat, and the story unremarkable. The book gets hype because of its pervasive use of 1980s popular culture, particularly its references to science fiction, fantasy, and video games. The problem is  that most of these references serve no purpose. Something is described by pointing out its resemblance to something from a film or television show—a particularly annoying form of "telling, rather than showing" given that a reader of the wrong age or background won't know the reference—but said reference adds nothing to the events at hand. Either that, or the reference is carried to cringe-worthy, fan-fiction-grade extremes. For instance, in one scene, the online avatar of the main character, Wade Watts (known online as Parzival) pilots a DeLorean DMC-12 resembling the one used in the Back to the Future films, except for the addition of the computerized voice and sweeping red light of KITT from Knight Rider, a pair of Ghost Busters logos adorning the doors, and a license plate reading "ECTO 88". 


Whether mentioned in passing or over the top like the aforementioned mash-up car, however, virtually all of these allusions are brought up and then dropped in the space of a sentence. The DeLorean, for example, takes up a couple of paragraphs and is then never used again. Ready Player One doesn't draw from 1980s popular culture; it just name-drops it all over the place. Sometimes it seemed the only purpose for these references is that the author and reader could share a knowing, self-congratulating smile.


The notion of a "massively multiplayer" online role-playing game becoming the human race's main form of entertainment presents some amusing possibilities, though, and Ready Player One doesn't completely squander its potential. The moment when I started to enjoy the book came about halfway through, in a chapter describing a day in Wade's life some time after his break-up with Art3mis. Cline shows him putting his life in order, rescuing his health and habits from the pallid, flabby state a life online had put them in. His avatar Parzival, previously a penniless high school student, becomes one of the coolest, most powerful characters in the OASIS. But then, at the end of the chapter, in a moment of insight, Wade realizes that all the good things in his life only exist inside in a world that isn't real. Despite his accomplishments, he lives alone in a featureless one-room apartment, never going or even looking outside. Cline takes the familiar narrative arc of, "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy falls into depression, boy turns his life around" and twists it in a way that I found interesting.


Cline shares the late twentieth century computer geek's vision of the Internet as a benevolent force. Wade has genuine feelings of friendship and love for his online friends, people he would never have met offline, people with whom he shares bonds of mutual interests and ideals rather than geography. An online world is one without racism or other prejudices. (Or at least, it's a world where you can avoid these prejudices by configuring your avatar appropriately. Let's not go into the implications of that.) Furthermore, despite its post-energy-crisis shabbiness, the world of Ready Player One is one in which the good guys have won: free speech, privacy, and "net neutrality" all rule the day.


At the same time, no matter how cool he tries to make the OASIS (and I admit, it is cool), Cline is conflicted about it. Its pleasures are tempered by the fact that for many of its players it serves as a drug, distracting them from the shabby state of real life in late twenty-first century Earth. Wade's dissatisfaction with a life spent entirely online is explored throughout the book, though never deeply. I would have liked to see the book explore this tension between the unifying and isolating effects of the online world in more detail.

The idea of falling in love with someone you've never met is an interesting one though. And Cline explores it with brilliance. The OASIS is a place where you can change your appearance, age and even gender. What you cannot change though, is your personality. People exist as nothing but raw personality in the OASIS and it is something our protagonist learns to value over time. 


In summary, Ready Player One touches on some interesting ideas, although it doesn't explore them as deeply as I would have liked. The writing is nothing special, but it gets the job done. The story gets more interesting in the second half, and the annoying popular culture references become less frequent. I'm glad I stuck it out to the end. And one the bright side the overcrowding of references might just be a good way to rediscover late twentieth century pop-culture, much like Halliday's quest urged our protagonist to. Even though it doesn't deserve the hype it is getting in nerd circles, Ready Player One is a decent read. And with another book by Ernest Cline, Armada, soon to be published, Ready Player One can be used to get a taste of Cline. 

I'd rate the book 7 out of 10 but Cline has his moments of brilliance throughout. Some might even call Cline to be the William Gibson of our generation. Will Armada live up to its expectations? Stay tuned.

Cline shows remarkable promise. Will he live up to it?