READY PLAYER ONE - My review.

I picked up READY PLAYER ONE mainly because I knew a movie version was coming out, and it would be Steven Spielberg’s return to the scifi genre after being away for more than a decade. And I love nothing more than a good treasure hunt story, or a yarn built around a quest, so the plot of RPO had a lot of appeal to me. What I am not is a gamer; that part of the story was potentially a turn off for me, but like any American who has lived through the last few decades, it is simply impossible not to have picked up at least a passing knowledge of video games.

I found READY PLAYER ONE to be an easy read, one of those novels set in a not so distant dystopian future America where crude oil has all but disappeared, the economy has crashed, poverty is endemic, and most of the population escapes this grim reality by logging onto OASIS, a fantasy filled virtual reality utopia, where the possibilities are as endless as reality is stifling and dead end. The main protagonist is an Oklahoma teenager named Wade Watts, who lives in a stack of house trailers – the slums of this ruined world. Like all his peers, Wade attends school inside OASIS, and looks forward to not much of a future. But he has one chance; that is to solve the puzzle left by the late James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, and inherit his billion dollar fortune. There are powerful and ruthless corporate forces, with endless access to resources, who want to solve the puzzle themselves and gain control of OASIS. When young Wade gets the first clue to the puzzle, he is off on a wild adventure, competing with friends and allies, while facing off with a villain willing to do anything, including murder, to win.

The twist on this is that Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of his youth, that era being the 1980’s, so that to solve his puzzle and win his fortune, a player has to know literally everything about 80’s movies, TV shows, music and especially those early and ancient video games from the Commodore 64 days and before.

The author, Ernest Cline, writes in a straight forward manner, using the first person (Wade’s) point of view in a way that lays out the action in a way that is easy to follow; if his characterizations are not especially deep, they do ring true, creating heroes worth rooting for and bad guys worth hating. Wade is an appealing underdog, and the girl he falls in love with, Art3mis, a fellow player and competitor for Halliday’s fortune, is a female protagonist worth winning. The chapters are short and action filled, my paperback copy comes in just under 400 pages, making it an easy read compared with the thousand page epics found on the shelf in Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the bookstore.

But try as I might, I could not love this book anywhere near as much as many of its devoted fans; first of all, virtual reality does not do it for me, at least most of the time, an exception being Tad Williams’s OTHERLAND epic. I will take an imaginary world sprung from the minds of Dan Simmons, Stephen Donaldson, George RR Martin, among others, any day over computer code and hardware. Then there is the info dumps Cline shoe horns into the story to bring the reader up to speed, they may be necessary, but I didn’t read them so much as slog through them. Then there is the overall theme of the book, which seems to be a nerd’s wish fulfillment where he flees an unsatisfying reality into a computer generated fantasy, where his avatar is everything he believes he is lacking: handsome, strong and brave. PRO has been criticized as promoting a “toxic gamer culture;” this might be unfair, and the book’s final pages does give lip service to refuting this claim, but it comes awfully late in a story that seems to revere all things high tech. That mid 21st Century teen Wade worships and enmeshes himself totally in the pop culture of the 80’s does seem kind of sad at times; we all have love for the decade when the first Star Wars trilogy was fresh and new and the young Spielberg made Raiders and E.T. in back to back summers, but it is a time and place that came and went. Some have called Cline’s book “Nostalgia Porn,” which may be true, although I suspect he was just mining the deep affection so many have for a decade that might well have been American popular culture at its zenith. Personally, I’ll take the 90’s any day; but to each, his own.

Anyway, I plan to see the movie, and hope for the best, but somehow I doubt Spielberg will make us forget about Indiana Jones, a rampaging T-Rex, or even Pre-Crime.

I would appreciate any and all comments and feedback from anyone who had taken the time to read this post. And if you are interested in reading my book, it can be found at the following:
Amazon: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
Smashwords: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

Please visit my Goodreads author page at: http://bit.ly/2nxmgS2