Readers,
I will be honest: the transition from Jane Eyre to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was rather abrupt. One moment I was wandering listlessly on the moors of 19th Century Britain, the next I found myself in a futuristic, virtual-reality based society, obsessed with 80s-era geek culture. So.
This book came to me by way of yet another parental recommendation, this time from my Dad. Dad is on a tireless quest to convert me to listening to audiobooks. Thus, every once and a while I'll get an email from Audible.com, with the highly personalized note: "Hi, I've listened to this audiobook, "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline, and thought you would enjoy it, too. It's totally free and you won't need a credit card if it is your first time accepting an Audible book from a friend." At which point, I immediately go to the nearest bookstore and buy a paper copy of the book in question. Because that's the kind of daughter I am.
The premise of Ready Player One (have you seen the movie? are you going to see the movie? need I tell you the premise at all?) is this: boy-geek, Wade, is on a quest to find an easter-egg prize within the vast virtual reality world of a video game universe. This game was created by an 80s-culture obsessed programming genius, and has quickly taken over the lives of many people in a somewhat dystopic near-future world. All fun and games right? But where is my Mr. Rochester?
In all seriousness, Ready Player One is not great literature. Nor is it great science fiction. Because the video-game setting is entirely based on recreations of other video games, movies and role-playing games, its world building is fairly derivative. More critically, it's just jam packed with too much stuff: instead of one all important artifact to fight over, there's a dozen; instead of one great test, there's six. There's a lot of explaining: how the game works, how the technology works, how the characters figure things out. And there's A LOT of references: to obscure video games, to pop culture icons of the 80s, to the recesses of internet culture.
Herein was my downfall. No one will tell you that I'm not a nerd. But it became clear while reading Ready Player One, that I am simply the wrong kind of nerd for this book. Don't get me wrong. I love Dune with all my heart. I love Star Wars more than any other movie franchise in existence. But I have never played a video game in my life. I spend a great deal of time trying to get away from my computer, not dive deeper into its recesses.
Nonetheless, this book has two things going for it. One: It's great fun. It moves with astonishing pace, and with an unabashed revelry in the geekdom which it sets out to deify. I respect that. Second: It gives you a little glimpse into the world of people whose lives revolve around the internet. Its most vibrant moments are those in which the gloves (literally, you need gloves to control your avatar in the VR universe) come off, and Wade must exit the richness of his life in VR. In VR, he has friends, wealth, fame and status. When he reenters reality, he is utterly alone. The book brings home the seduction of the internet, of any reality other than our own. It makes you sit with it, and ask: is it so wrong? Isn't it beautiful that a person like this, afraid and alone, can have escape and joy? For Ready Player One the answer is still on the side of reality, however brutal that may be. But this book brings you to that conclusion lovingly, with deep compassion for those who are tempted to choose easier alternatives. And while I'm not the right kind of nerd, I know that I too have my own techniques for distracting myself from reality. We all do, right? Ready Player One might be a homage to the great games and movies of an iconic era, but what it made me want more than anything is to set all that aside, turn off my television, put down my book, and go outside.
In the end, Ready Player One is a book about living life, and living it abundantly. Here's one of the moments where Wade must sit with the truth of his own reality. There's simplicity in this writing, sure, but I think there's something in the honesty that's chilling: "I'd come to see my rig for what it was...the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself. Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture-obsessed geek...I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame."