Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

First Attempt at a Book Review

CoolMom and I have this thing we do where one of us recommends a book to the other that the other, for various reasons, never reads.  "Oh, the book I've had on reserve for a month just arrived."  "I want to finish the last book in this series first."  It's weird.

Almost every time one of us breaks this pattern, though, the results are positive.   I spent months trying to get CoolMom to read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.  When she finally did, she loved it.  I'm currently trying to get her to start Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series without much success.  CoolMom's been working on me to read Ernest Cline's 2011 novel, Ready Player One, for the last several months.  I finally gave in, and I'm glad I did.

Ready Player One takes place in the post-peak oil year of 2044.  Much of the world lives in poverty, and the only escape for almost everyone is the massively multiplayer online universe of the OASIS, a virtual reality created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow.  Upon his death, James Halliday, whose avatar in the OASIS is called Anorak, releases a short film called Anorak's Invitation.  The film outlines a contest.  In short, three keys that open three gates are hidden somewhere in the OASIS.  The first player to find all three keys and to clear all three gates will inherit Halliday's considerable fortune along with a controlling interest in Gregarious Simulation Systems, the company Halliday and Morrow formed that controls the OASIS.   The prize becomes known as "Halliday's Easter Egg," and those who devote their lives to searching for it are egg hunters or "gunters."

James Halliday grew up in the 1980's, obsessed with video games and the pop culture of the time.  Players in his OASIS have a guarantee of privacy and pay no fees beyond the single quarter required to begin.  In an effort to locate the egg, gunters obsessively study 1980's pop culture for possible clues to the locations of the three keys.  Those scouring the OASIS for the egg include organized gunter clans and the ruthless IOI corporation that wants to control and commercialize the OASIS.  The novel's main character is Wade O. Watts, known as Parzival in the OASIS, a solo gunter and impoverished high school student.

The novel proceeds much as you might expect given the setup.  Parzival and his friends Art3mis, Aech ("H"), Shoto, and Daito battle the evil IOI to be the first to find Halliday's Easter Egg.  While the plot is conventional and movie theater-ready, the constant references to touchpoints from my own early years made this book something special for me.

In trying to understand Halliday's mind, Parzival becomes expert at early coin-op video games like Space Invaders, Pac Man, Joust, Defender, and Tempest.  He obsessively watches films like War Games, Real Genius, Ladyhawke, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  The "sitting room" in his virtual stronghold on the planetoid Falco is a replica of the living room from Family Ties.  Tandy's TRS-80, the Commodore 64, Atari's 2600 and all of its games figure prominently in the plot along with the music of Rush, Oingo Boingo, Frank Zappa, and Schoolhouse Rock.  And the entire novel is one, big tribute to the work of William Gibson with its corporatist dystopia and its virtual reality in which people can live out the past and even the dead speak to you as if they'd never gone.

My friends and I experienced, in the real world, almost all of the technology and pop culture that the characters in the OASIS experience virtually.  We sat on real basement sofas and argued over movies the way Aech and Parzival do in Aech's "basement."  We watched Monty Python movies together on cable or VHS.  We played Asteroids and Defender in the mall or at bowling alleys, and we challenged each other to games of Pitfall on the Atari or Jump Man on the Commodore 64.

With Ready Player One, Ernest Cline has created a little virtual reality in which I can go back to that time and, in a way, talk to someone as if he'd never really gone.