“Ready Player One” is the love child of Internet culture and nostalgia for the 1980s, I can’t imagine a book more custom made for geeks. The book is set in a dystopia 2044 with rampant poverty and famine where the only relief for the poor is escaping into a massive RPG world appropriately called the OASIS. The OASIS is basically “World of Warcraft” on crack and steroids, every story with a fan boy following has a world there, OASIS money is valid legal tender and the OASIS service economy seems to be the top provider of jobs.
The creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, is a computer geek obsessed with 1980s culture. At the beginning of the book, Halliday dies and in his final will sets up a search for an Easter Egg hidden within the OASIS, the winner of which will inherit his entire fortune. This spawns a subculture of OASIS treasure hunters called gunters as well as the Sixers, treasure hunters who are backed by an evil corporation, IOI, that wants to charge people to go online.
Our hero is a young, orphaned gunter named Wade Watts, aka Parzival, who has memorized every bit of 1980s pop culture in an effort to be the top contender for Halliday’s fortune. His quest is the ultimate gaming adventure as Wade must utilize his knowledge of hacking, arcade games, Dungeons and Dragons and children’s cartoons. If you like Gamma Squad, you will almost certainly love this book.
There is one major plot hole that Cline dances around with for most of the book before ultimately it dropping without a satisfactory resolution. We root for Watts and for the preservation of the OASIS, after all it is the only escape from a grim reality, but Cline makes it clear that the OASIS is very much a contributing factor to creating the dystopia. This is a world where the vast majority of people send there entire day jacked in online to a fantasy, reproducing until we lived stacked on top of each other, ignoring severe, real problems that need to be solved. Watts spends his entire life in hiding, watching and rewatching shows like “Family Matters”. He is the protagonist, and I definitely identify with him, but there is also something pitiful about how he cho0ses to spend his life.
I should mention that I listened to the audio book which was rather a surreal experience. The book is read by the excellent Wil Wheaton, who in the book is one of the protectors of individual liberties in the OASIS along with Cory Doct0row of Boing Boing. I kept expecting for there to be the audible equivalent of a wink during passages where Wheaton mentions himself or “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, unfortunately there was none.