Ready Player One

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One might well be one of the nerdiest books ever written. With space battles, video games, and a plot that swerves between the real world and a virtual counterpart, the book earns comparisons with geek-friendly fare like Ender’s Game and The Matrix. But what makes Ready Player One so eminently nerdy is that unlike the fictional virtual worlds it draws from, this book’s universe comes stocked with every bit of geek culture imaginable. It’s not many a novel that sees R2-D2 as a DJ spinning New Order discs.

The year is 2044. Environmental catastrophe impends, the conglomerate IOI owns half the world, and poverty has grown so rampant that most Americans live in skyscrapers built out of piled-up RVs.  It’s a grim future but one with a catch. In Cline’s retelling, in 2012, a Steve Jobs-like billionaire game designer created a massive virtual reality game: the OASIS. For a scant fee, users could exchange their unpleasant reality for a virtual haven, and so they did. The OASIS quickly swelled up in size and function such that “the terms ‘the OASIS’ and ‘Internet’ gradually became synonymous.” By 2044, shopping, chatting, and even federally approved schooling are some of OASIS’s more utilitarian features, but for most users, the game functions more like World of Warcraft. Players send their avatars out into massive landscapes—some original, some recreated fictional universes like Star Trek’s and Firefly’s—in search of points and quests.

The most popular quest in OASIS is known as the Hunt. Hidden throughout the game by deceased creator Jack Halliday are three keys whose capture will unlock a grand prize: full control over OASIS and Halliday’s estate. Five years of intense worldwide searching have turned up nothing, and users are beginning to wonder if the contest is all a big hoax. That is, of course, until an unlikely someone finds the first key.

Wade Watts is the prototypical star of nerd-beloved pop culture: a young, orphaned male, friendless and penniless, Watts has little going for him but for his good heart and clever mind. He’s an underdog of the classic mold, one who, like Skywalker and Potter before him, finds himself swept up in sudden fame, fortune, and danger. Cline tells Ready Player One from Watts’s perspective, a narrative choice perhaps necessary to describe all the leaping back and forth the book does from one world to another but also one that provides access to Watts’s humorous internal monologue. Like many raised on a heavy pop cultural diet, Watts communicates in speech peppered with book quotes, movie quotes, and song lyrics. Dialogue between Watts and his OASIS pals abounds with allusions obvious and subtle to things like Star Wars, internet memes, and, of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If it seems improbable that the teenagers of 2044 should be so well-acquainted with 80s pop culture, their cross-generational familiarity is thanks to Halliday’s Hunt. A socially awkward computer nerd, Halliday felt more comfortable with the movies, comics, and games of his youth than with communicating with other human beings. For Halliday, the Hunt wasn’t just an eccentric way of passing down his creation to a worthy successor, it was an opportunity to rewrite the culture at large so that it shared his personal obsessions. The only way to decipher Halliday’s clues is through an obsessive knowledge of 80s pop culture and of Halliday’s enormous collected writings. There’s a narcissistic component to his cultural revisionism, seeking as it does to draw the whole world into one man’s passions, and Cline ties Halliday’s vanity to the book’s thematic interest in the problems with nostalgia and escapism. Both involve a retreat from reality into a world of personal fantasy, even and especially when there are real problems that need to be fixed.

Still, Cline understands the appeal of escapism as well as the distinctive pleasures contained within geek culture. Amassing mounds of useless trivia as Watts and his friends do might seem dull and pointless to outsiders, but Cline highlights the satisfaction and pride of possessing such encyclopedic knowledge. And although the literary community has by and large turned its nose up at video games, Ready Player One is a gushing love letter to gaming, from its pixilated origins to its increasingly immersive future. Although the book cautions about the dangers of getting sucked into a virtual world at the cost of ignoring the real one, Ready Player One is ultimately unabashedly pro-video games. I’ve never read a book that so perfectly captures the exuberance of finally beating a difficult boss or of discovering a level’s hidden secrets.

Like many plot-driven, first person narratives, Ready Player One occasionally suffers from sounding like a laundry list of subject-verb sentences. (“First I did this. Then I did this. Then I did this.”) Cline is no elegant stylist, but then again, it’s not the prose that draws us into Ready Player One. It’s Cline’s sprawling, enthusiastic love for geek culture. The absolute blast he has in melding together so many of his interests is positively infectious. I couldn’t help but geek out myself watching Cline unload every giant robot, warrior-mage, and space cowboy in his arsenal.

And what an exciting story he unloads them into. Ready Player One pumps us through its pages with the ease of an addictive video game. It’s got everything you could want from a mash note to geek culture: powerful villains, first romances, epic quests--not to mention tons and tons of fighting. Whether it’s an arcade duel or a shoot-off between spaceships, Ready Player One rarely goes a chapter without some sort of battle. The siege of a fortress toward the book’s end gathers together so many sci-fi and fantasy characters in one giant clash, it will no doubt be a legal nightmare for the inevitable film adaptation. Fun, smart, and fast-paced, Ready Player One is the best book featuring mecha-robot battles you’ll read all year.