On My Shelves: Ready Player One

I'd heard of this book (by Earnest Cline) off and on for years, but seeing a movie released caused me to actually pick it up and read it.

Wade Watts, AKA Parzival, lives in the culmination, or perhaps nadir, of development of the trailer park – the "stacks", where trailers have been literally stacked to heights of twenty or more, sheltering the desperate and displaced in a world where a combination of climate change and energy depletion has caused the collapse of American society and most of the rest of the world. It is a dystopian, cyberpunk-ish future, and Wade's near the bottom of the pecking order – he kinda-sorta has a place to live (with an aunt who cares nothing for him) and gets enough food, but other than that, he has only one thing: access to the world-girdling virtual reality called the OASIS.

But as Parzival, he has one other thing: a dream, a goal, a vision: to find the ultimate "Easter Egg", a secret hidden deep within the very code of the OASIS – the legacy of James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS. When Halliday died, he left a last will and testament and the ultimate riddle with the ultimate prize: whoever solves the riddle, finding the Three Keys and passing the Three Gates they unlock, will claim complete and total ownership of Halliday's company and the OASIS itself – a prize perhaps worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

When this eccentric will was announced, most of the world went mad trying to hunt down the "Easter Egg" of the Keys… but time passed, and no one even found one of the Keys. For many people, the mania passed – they believed it would never be solved, or that it was some kind of practical joke by Halliday. But those who remained, the egg hunters, or "gunters", became a competitive fellowship and community, a force to be reckoned with in the OASIS.

And then Parzival, through a stroke of luck (and a great deal of preparation and study), finds the Copper Key. On the instant he becomes a celebrity, subject of wonder and awe and envy… and a target.

For there are those who want Halliday's inheritance and will stop at nothing to get it.

This was undoubtedly a very fun book. It is clearly targeted at my generation. Clues that Wade/Parzival had to study deeply to understand, that author Cline had to emphasize by making Halliday's will trigger an entire 1980's revival, are ones that took me not a moment to recognize and understand (for instance, the very mention of a "Red Star" and I knew precisely what it referred to and where Parzival would have to go next).

The book is chock-full of references to things that are intimately familiar to people my age (or a bit younger – Cline himself is ten years my junior). Halliday was a product of the 80s, and so the 80s became his theme and, ultimately, the theme of the world and puzzle he created. These are certainly fun for me – after all, I do a lot of similar things in my books, like Grand Central Arena.

At the same time, the dystopian world Cline creates is a stark contrast to the world of the OASIS and the perky, sparkly 1980s cheesiness that gets spread so heavily through the virtual world. There's still high technology… but aside from the OASIS itself, which is only accessible easily because Halliday deliberately set it up that way, most people will never get to play with it. Fail to pay your debts on time, and a corporation will send a collection squad – who will turn you into a shock-collared indentured servant running a Customer Support line, or worse. Even within the OASIS there are things you can only do with money; Wade's been mostly stuck on one virtual world out of thousands because he can't afford the fees for transport.

And as in many cyberpunk dystopias, the companies are not only more powerful, but more overtly ruthless. They will murder if they think that's in their interest – and they prove it by doing so. Wade, and his other online friends Aech, Art3mis, and Shoto, are in mortal peril in both worlds.

Besides being a reference-fest and a technothriller, Ready Player One is also a coming-of-age story. Parzival is a geek whose real-life experiences have helped discourage him from meeting people. It takes something extraordinary to pull him out of that shell and let him discover what he's truly capable of doing.

A point that's made in the novel, several times, is that the OASIS makes it possible for people to be what they want to be, to present the face to the world that they would prefer – or that they think will be most advantageous, such as a black woman presenting herself as a white man because that helps her land a job. This kind of thing is actually very important, because the OASIS has essentially BECOME the Internet; it is the major contact medium for everything from low-level job-seekers to top-flight corporate meetings, and it is designed to permit complete security of all private details. Without this, Wade and his friends would be instantly unmasked and tracked down; even so, only sheer luck keeps Wade alive at first. But once he accepts his situation, Parzival/Wade and his allies begin to strike back, even against the multi-billion dollar corporation that has made finding the Keys, and gaining Halliday's inheritance, their number-one priority.

Is this a great novel? … Probably not. It pushes a lot of nostalgia buttons, and for those of us who remember being like Wade, it's a great retrospective fantasy, one that is basically a 1980s teen thriller movie in itself, like War Games or Cloak and Dagger or The Manhattan Project. Could I find the Keys and win the prize? Probably not. I think I'd be able to find the Keys given time – I recognized the references, often before they were connected by the protagonist (Tomb of Horrors I've owned in more than one incarnation), but the challenges Halliday sets for those passing the Gates? Out of my league, especially the videogame related ones, though I dunno if I could manage to dialogue my way through any movie THAT well either. My reflexes are not what they were in the 80s, and neither is my memory.

It's certainly an interesting novel, though, and a lot of fun for those who either love, or at least won't be bothered by, the omnipresent 80s nostalgia. Recommended!