Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Book Reviews, Reading

Ready Player OneReady Player One by Ernest Cline

My rat­ing: 5 of 5 stars

Add this book to the short list of must-​​reads for every True Geek, right along­side Snow Crash. It’s a glee­ful homage to geek­dom and pop culture.

Wade explains to the reader that he was born after human­ity wore the world out and escaped to OASIS, a mas­sive sim­u­la­tion that has replaced the inter­net and all other forms of enter­tain­ment. Nobody seems to spend time in real­ity any more, because it sucks. There are mul­ti­ple wars going on over the few energy sources that are left. Poverty, hunger, and home­less­ness are ram­pant everywhere.

Most peo­ple who are for­tu­nate enough to live indoors at all are like Wade, who lives with his aunt and her lat­est boyfriend in a three-​​bedroom dou­blewide trailer shared with 17 peo­ple. The trailer is at least near the top of a stack, which is just what it sounds like: a stack of trail­ers 10 or so high, so many across and wide, so that 500 or more trail­ers are held together with rusted scaf­fold­ing, chains, and what­ever other rein­force­ments peo­ple have added over the years. Stack col­lapses are common.

Wade spends most of his time in his hide­out, the back of an old van that’s parked in a junk­yard and crammed in a stack of vehi­cles. That’s where he keeps his com­puter and other equip­ment, so he can attend school (in OASIS, of course) and spend time research The Con­test, which is the cen­ter of his life.

The cre­ater of OASIS, James Hal­l­i­day, cre­ated The Con­test in his will. Who­ever wins it will inherit Halliday’s vast for­tune and con­trol of OASIS. At the open­ing of the novel, it has been five years since Hal­l­i­day died and con­tes­tants are ridiculed in every­day soci­ety as obses­sive losers.

Wade’s quest through The Con­test and his fight to sim­ply sur­vive is far more inter­est­ing than I thought it would be. I’ll also admit to being enter­tained by the 80s trivia that pops up through­out the book (inte­gral to The Con­test). I’m biased, as I was a teen dur­ing those years.

I whole­heart­edly rec­om­mend this book. It’s one of the very few that I’ll be sav­ing to re-​​read in the future.



View all my reviews

Permalink | August 23rd, 2012

Comments are closed.