Module 10: Science Fiction: Ready Player One

Photo taken by me

Cline, E. (2011). Ready player one. New York City: Crown Publishers. 978-0-307-88743-6

Summary 

Ready Player One is a dystopian story in the near-future of 2044, in which America has devolved into a wasteland thanks to an energy crisis. Wade, like most Americans, lives in abject poverty in Oklahoma City and, like most Americans, is a frequent user of OASIS (think Sims meets World of Warcraft), a virtual reality galaxy where players have an avatar and go to school, go to work, level up to get experience points via fighting and questing, and generally go about their day-to-day business. The two creators of OASIS are James Halliday and Ogden Morrow (think Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak), who grew up together and created OASIS and became bazillionaires.

Upon Halliday’s death, five years before Ready Player One starts, Halliday’s lawyers release a viral video in which Halliday explains that he had hidden an Easter egg somewhere in the OASIS and whoever finds it first will inherit everything of Halliday’s including money, stock, and control of OASIS. And thus begins the madcap rush of users learning everything they can about Halliday --mainly his love of all things ‘80s pop culture, video games, movies, and music-- in order to ferret out where the Easter egg is hidden.

Almost on accident, Wade (whose avatar’s name is Parzival) stumbles across the first Key in the journey to finding Halliday’s Easter egg. On his way out of the tomb, he runs into Art3mis, a female avatar who Wade has developed a crush on after reading her blog for the past three years. She also succeeds in acquiring the Key. A few days later, Aech (pronounced like the letter “H”), Wade’s one and only friend, also obtains the Key, followed by Daito and Shoto, two Japanese brothers, several days later. Each of the “High Five” (so named because they are now in the top five spots on Halliday’s scoreboard) are able to use their Keys to get through the first Gate thanks to the extensive research they’ve conducted on all things Halliday and the ‘80’s.

Unfortunately, an army of Sixers is on their tail. The Sixers are employed by IOI, a competing internet service provider-like company who want to find the Easter egg first in order to have control over OASIS and turn it into a profit-machine for their company. Wade, the other High Five-ers, and many other OASIS users are against IOI taking such control. As such, the race to the Easter egg has become ever more precarious as the end comes closer in sight.

Wade must prevail through OASIS-based and real-life threats in the months before the second, and then the third and final Key and Gate are before him. Thankfully, despite some tension between him, Aech, Art3mis, Daito, and Shoto, they are able to all band together at the very end in order to defeat the Sixers, prevail for the greater good, and learn the important lesson that reality is better than OASIS because it’s real.

As a Genre Example

Ready Player One definitely appeals to the reader’s intellect via the fact that Cline goes to great pains to explain much of the video game science and strategies behind OASIS and the video games from the ‘80’s. There is some ground for discussion due to the questions posed around virtual “life” and real life; however, it is “solved” in the end when Halliday/Anorak takes Parzival aside. Additionally, Ready Player One fits the mold of sci-fi because it is set in the future (2044) and centers around technology, although there is some magic that avatars can use, it is rarely mentioned and even more rarely utilized by and/or against Parzival. There is quite a lot of ‘80’s jargon, but because Wade is an expert, it is often explained so that readers can also get the inside joke. The tone is more dark than comic, but it’s not gritty in the way a Horror or Hard-boiled Mystery is. The pacing was extremely slow, with an emphasis on Wade’s thought processes and musings rather than ideas and/or adventure.

Evaluation

Ready Player One was okay. I liked when Parzival/Wade was actually on the quest within OASIS, but when he is just musing or thinking about the clues or explaining backstory and the science, it was really boring, and kind of made me exasperated with Wade. By the end, I really wanted Art3mis to be the one to find the egg, not Wade, because she was more round and dynamic character than Wade. I’d give it 2.5 stars out of five. I’d recommend this book to others. In fact, I gave it to my brother for Christmas a year a half ago based on the word-of-mouth of patrons checking it out. It seemed like up his alley, and now that I’ve read it, I definitely know it’s up his alley. Some of my gamer friends commented on my Instagram pic of it that they had read it and liked it, too, so people who like to play video games and/or tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons would also like it.

Reader's Advisory

Fans of fantasy would probably the closest cross-over genre to enjoy Ready Player One because of its references to magic/wizard avatars. And it would also be a good introduction to “adult” novels for teen readers.