Book Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One
By Ernest Cline
Random House
Publication date: August 16, 2011
ISBN:978-0307887436

Book review by Samir Mathur

The year is 2044. Thanks to wars, widespread poverty, and the ever-decaying environment, the world is crumbling. The one salvation in most people’s lives is the OASIS – an immersive computerized experience where many people spend the vast majority of their lives. I don’t know much about the game Second Life, but I understand it’s similarly all-encompassing. Anyway, the creator of the OASIS has just died, and he left an Easter Egg hidden somewhere in the universe. The first person to crack a series of cryptic clues and find the Egg wins the late creator’s entire fortune, somewhere in the “hundreds of billions of dollars” range. On your marks…

So that’s the background for Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Cline has already earned his nerd credentials by writing the 2009 film Fanboys, and he really stretches his geeky wings on his debut novel. The OASIS creator, it turns out, was a massive fan of the 1980s, and so the quest is loaded with nods to that time period. Whether the main character, Wade, is reenacting the entirety of WarGames or playing as a CG wizard in the ancient video game Joust, references to that decade abound. I am not particularly well-versed in 80s trivia, or video games, so most of the references went over my head, but that didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of the story. I’m surprised there’s no nod to Tron, though, since the two share a videogame-within-videogame conceit.

Not surprisingly for a novel set in such a specific universe, there is a lot of set-up, and a few sections of exposition that tend to get a little slow. Wade, an 18 year old from Oklahoma, is a fun narrator – he doesn’t have any friends outside of the OASIS, and becomes a sensation when he is the first person in the world to crack the first part of the code. For a while, the story moves ahead at a reasonable pace, but there’s no real sense of danger. It’s just a scavenger hunt in an online universe – who cares? The enemy comes in the shape of the Sixers – corporate goons who are also searching for the Egg and the cash reward it promises. And they aren’t afraid to resort to murder – in the real world – to get it first.

The novel does a great job of describing how teenagers use the Internet – all the hacking, chats, blogs, emails and other things that I’m already too old to fully understand. Wade bonds with some other strangers also on the hunt, but obviously they are rivals so they can’t be trusted with too much information. As I said earlier, the story has its lulls, but the final third is all action-packed. Also, it involves giant fighting robots, so that’s pretty neat. There are some vastly underdeveloped points about discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, which don’t fit in the tone of the book at all, and those could’ve been left out.

Minor quibbles aside, it’s an impressive first novel. The narrative arc – lots of people chasing one prize – is old but effective, and there’s no lack of creativity or originality in Cline’s work. I’m not really the type of nerd that this is aimed at, but I found myself really getting into it, particularly in that final third that I talked about. It’s an adventure, and everyone’s playing, so why not join in?

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