Ready Player One

By Ernest Cline

Broadway Books     2011

374 pages     Science Fiction

Audio Book

What a marvelous geek fest! My husband and I listened to Ready Player One on our trip to the Alabama coast in February. It got us there and back, and then we had to spend a few breakfast reading days to finish it. What amazed me was that it held the attention of 70-somethings who didn’t quite get all the 80s references the book offered—and my husband has never played a video game in his life. Still, we were fascinated and can’t wait for the movie to come out at the end of the month.

The reality of teenage Wade Watts is dystopian. It is 2044 in Oklahoma, and the world is in near collapse. Wade lives in a high rise of stacked house trailers, but his true life is the virtual reality universe he escapes to every day. He attends school in that universe and spends most of his time in a game called the OASIS, a virtual-reality online game. One reviewer called it Second Life on steroids.

The OASIS was designed by a famous video game designer from the 1980s named James Halliday, who has hidden his fortune (billions of dollars) in the online game. The entire geek world is trying to find the Easter Egg, the last treasure in the game that will release the money, but it has been five years since Halliday died, and no one has made much progress. Wade’s gaming Avatar, Parzival, is racking up points in the game, but it is when he combines forces with four other avatars that the excitement begins to build. Of course there has to be an enemy, and the OASIS enemy is a corporate behemoth named IOI that is attempting to take over the world.

That’s the plot. But it is so much fun. Ready Player One is very visual, because Cline is a screenwriter, but it is also extremely humorous. The references just keep rolling. In order to solve the game, Wade has had to become familiar with as many 1980s references as he can, so lines from movies, TV shows, and songs are abundant. For example, somebody found 88 movie references in the book. (How many times would you have to read a book to document all the references? I told you it was a geek fest!) Wade also has to master every video game from the 1980s and decide which of those games were Halliday’s favorites.

We especially enjoyed the audio reading by actor, Will Wheaton. (I saw him last night on an episode of Big Bang Theory.) He brings the book to life. BTW, he mentioned in an interview that he really likes doing audio books because that’s how he gets his own reading done by preparing for the audio recording. The movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, the biggest name around. Early reviews are encouraging. The movie makers must have had a great time!

My last comment is that reading doesn’t have to be a serious enterprise. Sometimes it just needs to be fun, fun, fun. This is one of those times!

Here is a you tube video of references in the movie.