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upfrog · 5 years

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Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Since I’m now properly getting into my 2019 reading list, I thought I might stick some reviews of books I’m reading here. So we’ll see how this goes.

This review is spoiler free.

Ready Player One was an adequate piece of science fiction that felt like it's only real reason to exist was to let the author, Ernest Cline, write a copious number of 80′s references. It brushed against a couple of properly interesting topics, but then seemed to deliberately avoid actually using those topics to make the book itself interesting, or even memorable as an exploration of anything beyond how to write a collection of nerd buzzwords for only mildly nerdy people. I don't regret reading it at all, but I doubt I'll read it again unless someone makes a compelling argument that I missed something.

The year is 2045, and human civilization is well into it’s downward spiral. A massive energy crisis has left much of humanity impoverished, and corporate warlords (or to steal a phrase from Neal Stevenson, “equity lords”) appear to control most of the remaining enclaves of relative prosperity. Whatever is left of the national government, at least in the US, appears to be impotent to help the situation. Wade Watts, our protagonist, is like most people of his time in that he has given up all hope in reality, and instead immerses himself in the exciting and prosperous online land of OASIS, a virtual reality massively multiplayer online role playing game that most people seem to consider to be the only world worth living in.

In this digital realm, Wade is a Gunter, a player who has dedicated themselves to solving a massive puzzle posthumously left by the eccentric creator of the game, James Halliday. The first person to solve the puzzle (which consists of finding several keys, and using them to unlock various challenges) is set to receive the entirety of Halliday’s estate, including several hundred billion dollars, and complete control over OASIS. Solving this puzzle requires an obsessive knowledge of Halliday’s interests, which seem to almost exclusively revolve around nerdy 80′s pop culture: video games, cult classic movies, music, sitcoms, the whole nine yards. In their attempt to solve this puzzle, the Gunters become experts on Halliday, his personal life, and every piece of pop culture he ever hinted that he enjoyed.

All good so far, right? Right! It’s an interesting enough premise, and if you’re into retro video games and trivia, you may really enjoy it’s execution. For my part, 8 years ago I bet I would have loved this book, but nowadays I’m less into all the 80′s culture, so the book didn’t have that crutch to help my opinion of it. This is a shame, because the book needed that crutch.

The first problem is that Wade rarely feels genuinely challenged. Much of his struggle takes place “off screen”, and once it’s brought back on screen, he starts succeeding at almost everything. Set backs are rare, and when they occur, the book never really treats them as having any weight behind them. Part of this can be blamed on the virtual setting; after all, part of the point of a video game is that if you die in the game, you don’t die in real life, which does make the consequences for failure less severe by default. However, I think that the setbacks could still have been meaningful if the author had wanted them to be, which I’m not sure he did. That is of course his prerogative, but the book was left weaker for it.

The second problem, which I consider more serious, is that the book seems to avoid it’s own most interesting parts. Virtual reality is an interesting and increasingly relevant theme, as is the idea of people abandoning reality in favor of a cleaner, happier, more prosperous virtual reality. The book establishes that many in it’s world live their real lives within OASIS, with the physical reality more of an unwelcome chore than anything else. It then fails to follow up on this theme in any meaningful way. The book also touches briefly on the social impacts of being able to decouple the real “you” and the virtual “you”, the latter of which is often more important in the book’s world, but it never goes anywhere with it. Heck, the Gunters are in many ways a budding religious order; had Cline chosen to focus on that idea, I think he could have written some interesting material around the idea of the construction of deities. But this too is not explored. Every theme that could have made the book interesting was briefly mentioned, if it was included at all, and then dropped.

Personally, I didn’t really find Cline’s writing very effective. It didn’t pull me in particularly, and I wasn’t left with any particularly good imagery. That said, I find David Weber’s writing style riveting, so maybe I’m just weird. But while it wasn’t exceptionally effective, I didn’t have any real problems with it, and had some fairly good foreshadowing. Not necessarily subtle, but well executed, and it does a lot to make the world feel real, like something vast that we are only seeing through a small window. So what do we see when we look through that window?

We see 80′s references of all sorts. If that’s your thing, this book will probably be bumped up several notches in your esteem. But once again, it didn’t do anything very conceptually interesting with all of it’s pop culture. The 80′s references could have been replaced with 90′s references, or 00′s references, and had little effect on the story. Just change the names around, and re-write the details of some of the puzzles. Even in-universe, it appears that the only reason that Halliday chose the 1980′s was his own nostalgia. For my part, the 80′s references started to feel pretty tired before I was a quarter of the way through the book, though they never got the point where I found them annoying.

What was somewhat annoying was the way that Cline discussed his references. Many of the things he wrote into his world are relatively obscure; cult classics on the Atari 2600, box office flops, things that in the modern day have a presence in two main cultural groups: the people who were kids when the reference was first relevant, and nerds who have found themselves smitten with this piece of retro culture, and have adopted it as their own in the modern day. You will note that these two groups are by no means mutually exclusive. But Cline writes his references as if he is trying to put them in terms that people not in either of these groups can easily understand. This is an understandable decision, as he presumably wanted his book to be appealing to people other than nerds, but the result is that some of the book feels at times like it was written by an outsider trying to write about these in-jokes. One minor example is how every creative process that led to the world of OASIS is referred to as being programming. Technically accurate perhaps, but it feels like Cline is afraid that he’ll scare off the normies if he refers to, say, animation, or concept art. Another minor frustration is that OASIS has a fairly typical case of Fictional Video Game Syndrome, where everything in the game is named to make it sound gamer-y to non gamers, with the result that it sounds extremely fake to people who actually play video games.

Admittedly, minor frustrations with how the book’s references are handled are, well, minor. But when a book feels like it raison dêtre is to have a bunch of pop culture references, it becomes harder to excuse failure in the delivery of these references. But aside from this relatively minor annoyance, the references were handled fairly well. While it is clear that the book mainly exists as a house for these references, they always stay in keeping with the rest of the world. Various classic video games are brought up and discussed in a story-appropriate manner, and they don’t feel shoehorned in.

I realize that I’ve just spent a silly number of words talking about all the things I didn’t like about the book, but at the end of the day I really don’t mind it. I read it, and I enjoyed it while I read it. I feel no need to read it again, or to watch the movie, or read any of Cline’s other works, but the book was certainly not bad. I’d recommend it to anyone who secretly wishes they could have been born in time to experience the 80′s in person, or to readers who are getting their feet wet with science fiction. It may also be good for readers who have trouble getting into most books, but connect readily to the digital world. For others, I wouldn’t steer you away from the book, but I wouldn’t recommend it either, unless you liked the sound of what you just read.

This is not exactly a popular blog, so I’m not really guessing that anyone will read this. In case someone does, feel free to leave any feedback you may have, and if you want to talk about the book, hit me up!

#book review #Ready Player One #Ernest Cline #review #book #literature #2019 reading list

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