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| Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Crown Publishers, 374 pages, $24. 2012 Prometheus Award |
Nerdgasm: 80s pop-culture, a VR MMORPG Easter Egg, retro-VGs, & one hell of a BIG BOSS!
Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One, already has a reputation that precedes itself. Published only three years ago, this genre-expanding dystopian YA adventure-quest bestseller (that’s not a mouthful) has already climbed the cult-status pantheon. Just flip to his dust-jacket bio and you’ll see Cline posing in front of a DeLorean--a vehicle that makes its fair share of appearances in the novel--along with the claim that “his primary occupation [in spite of everything else] has always been geeking out”. If Ready Player One is any gauge for Cline’s ability to “geek out”, then he’s written an exemplary CV.
Jump to a resource depleted America circa 2044, where the Global Energy Crisis has nearly wiped out suburbia. As a result, urban populations have become swollen with the new influx of refugees. Urban sprawl has resulted in the construction of city-fringe slums called “stacks” where trailer homes are precariously pilled high on top of each other. In this not-too distant future, oil reserves have nearly been depleted and climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet--“Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless” (17). Bleak; but in short, a pretty accurate projection of Earth’s current climate trajectory.
Fortunately, this desolate future has an OASIS. Quite literally, the aptly named OASIS--Ontologically Anthropocentric sensory Immersive Simulation--is a “globally networked virtual reality most humanity now use on a daily basis”. This VR massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG)--think Matrix but with the fantasy and sci-fi elements ratcheted up a few pegs--is the last refuge of a world in collapse. Created by an eccentric recluse named James Halliday--based on the personalities of Howard Hughes & Willy Wonka--who grew up in the 1980s along with the rise of PCs and video-game consoles, the OASIS has one grandiose challenge--a hidden easter egg.
Inspired by early game designer, Warren Robinett--creator of Adventure for the Atari 2600--who coded one of the first video game “easter eggs”, Halliday hides one in the OASIS. This easter egg is the linchpin of the novel, the primary quest of the story, & how Cline initiates readers into his fictional world. By the opening of the novel, Halliday has recently passed and cc'd his will to every last person in the OASIS which stipulates that whoever finds his easter egg will inherit his entire fortune--estimated to be in excess of two-hundred and forty billion dollars. This challenge comedically sets the world topsy-turvy as millions of people adopt the 80s pop-culture obsessions of Halliday--“By 2041, spiked hair and acid washed jeans were back in style, and covers of hit ’80s pop songs by contemporary bands dominated the music charts. People who had actually been teenagers in the 1980s, all now approaching old age, had the strange experience of seeing the fads and fashions of their youth embraced and studies by their grandchildren” (8).
Our narrator, Wade Owen Watts, an adolescent boy orphaned by a pair of negligent parents, grows up in literal squalor but in the virtual OASIS and becomes a dedicated egg hunter or “gunter”. When he’s not in VR school, Wade’s avatar, Parzival--named after the Arthurian knight, Percival, famous for his grail quest--is utterly immersed in the video games, music, movies, television shows, and general nostalgia of the 1980s--Family Ties, Cosmos, War Games, PacMan, the Monty Python oeuvre, John Hughes films, and a plethora of references that can get dizzying at times but Wade seems to have an encyclopedic recall of even the most esoteric bits of 80s pop culture.
Armed with this extensive repertoire of knowledge, young Parzival embarks on a quest of galactic proportions--a scavenger hunt that lasts years--rife with riddles, mazes, challenges galore, and a perfectly evil multinational corporation called Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a “global communications conglomerate and the world’s largest Internet service provider” who want to take over OASIS to monetize and privatize it. A nod to Net Neutrality no doubt. Throw in a slight love interest along with a few team-mates/rivals and you’ve got Ready Player One in a nutshell. As cline puts it: A total nerdgasm!
Apart from the genre-style dialogue, teenage narration, and well-trod plot devices; Ready Player One is charming in its nerdy sincerity. Cline isn’t offering much new territory on nerd culture or cliche nerd identities but he depicts those things without the authorial sneering of someone deriding gamer fandom. Herein, lies the strength of his novel. Maslin of The New York Times calls the novel an “ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture” which sounds about right.
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The New York Times “A Future Wrappen in 1980s Culture” by Janet Maslin
A.V. CLUB “Ready Player One” by Kevin McFarland
USA Today “‘Ready Player One’: Willy Wonka meets ‘The Matrix’” by Don Oldenburg
io9 “Ready Player One is a dystopian gamer novel that’s as addictive as great game” by Annalee Newitz
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