One can absolutely feel Mr. Cline’s love (sometimes bordering on obsession) of 80’s pop culture vibrating from every word of this, his debut novel. As a child of the 80’s, that is just fine with me. Having watched the movie prior to finding the book in a local Goodwill, my hopes were high. My wife and I enjoyed the movie a great deal and I was looking forward to reading the source material. As is often true, the book completely eclipses the movie.
Ready Player One is set in the near, dystopian future of 2040, where the crippling poverty serves as a haunting treatise on modern American life. Citizens turn to the altered reality offered by a virtual experience known as the Oasis. Within its digital walls, one can forget about their dire circumstances and exist in a nirvana of sights, sounds, and fantasies. When the creator of the Oasis dies, ownership and ultimate control of this virtual kingdom is to be decided by a trial by ordeal within its confines. James Halliday, the aforementioned architect, leaves as his last will and testament a challenge to collect three keys in order to win the ultimate Easter Egg, his fortune and sole jurisdiction within the Oasis. Contestants in this contest of contests are known as egg hunters or simply ‘gunters’.
We are introduced to one of these gunters, Wade Watts, five years after the contest began. Interest in it had waned over the intervening time when a winner was not immediately crowned. Diehards such as Wade, however, never surrendered their passion for the competition and the man that started it. The reader is introduced to Wade’s friends and competitors in short order. Although it is apparent through quality of narrative which characters have importance in the story, I found them compelling and grew to root for each of them in their own way.
No good adventure would be complete without a villain; Mr. Cline provides one of those as well in the form of IOI, an evil corporation in the spirit of early 90’s Microsoft. IOI seeks to secure the Oasis for themselves with the intention of monetizing it for all it is worth and in doing so, transform it from the common people’s escape into the elite’s playground. Although the heroes seek the ‘egg’ for themselves, all of them can agree that no one wants it to fall into the hands of IOI.
While not a paragon of literature, Ready Player One is a highly enjoyable romp as the reader follows Wade and his fellow gunters through a gauntlet of challenges rooted in the decade of excess. Anyone who grew up in the 80’s will find a treasure trove of nostalgia within this novel’s pages, as the author explores every facet of popular culture from the time. Those born in later decades may not see it for the love letter that it is, but I believe that the story and characters are engaging enough to draw in even the most casual reader.
Personally, this book represents a love letter to the warm spring days of my childhood. As a self-professed (not to mention proud) nerd, I read Ready Player One as one would pour over a photo album, assumed lost but located beneath the weight of time itself. The prose contained within never came between me and the story, allowing me to devour page after page like a starving man. While the last scene still echoed in my mind, I felt such disappointment in the fact that there were no more ahead of me that I immediately turned to the first page and began reading once more. I have never done this with any of the hundreds of books I have read over my almost five decades on this earth. That alone should convey the magnitude of my fondness for Mr. Cline’s work.