Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Tiny Overview

James Halliday died, and has left behind billions of dollars, as well as the legacy and fortune of the OASIS. Anybody can have it. As long as they can find it. 

Wade Watts is poor and lives with his abusive Aunt in a stack of caravans. In 2045, the world is ravaged by climate change, starvation and poverty - everybody seeks refuge in the OASIS to ignore their everyday life. The hunt for easter eggs to find JDH's fortune has been ignored in the media for years, until Wade finally cracks the first step.

Themes:

• Sci-Fi
• Cli-Fi
• Young Adult
• Adventure
• Class
• Dystopia
• Fantasy
• Friendship
• Identity
• Inequality

Context

In an interview with WIRED, Cline spoke about how he wrote about his characters.

He took his inspiration for Halliday from Willie Wonka, crossed with Howard Hughes and Richard Garriott. For the main characters of the book, Wade, Art3mis, and Aech, he based them off of geek stereotypes and people that he has met over the years. Daito and Shoto are based off Hikkomori in Japan.

My Waffling

I quite enjoyed this book. My friend studied this book for school, as well as 1984. I cannot understand the link there. 

The fact it was a cli-fi was probably one thing I could not shake out of my head. Everybody has power outages, the world is in a crisis, yet everybody is plugged into these VR headsets for hours a day? With almost zero repercussions? If they had basically no energy, why would they use it all for a more advanced version of the metaverse? I could not shake this thought the whole of the book. I also kept thinking about Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe this was his vision for the Metaverse.

The whole book was plagued with 80's pop culture references and things of that sort and I loved that. I did not love the feeling that I should consume hundreds of different 40 year old media just to understand this book. It didn't hinder me too much, if I really needed to know things then I just googled them for context / mental imagery. This book clearly had a lot of thought and research placed into it, which I really do appreciate. Apart from not being able to understand some things, the other downside was that I was not able to predict where the easter eggs and other clues were, because I just did not know anything about the 80's. Other than The Cure - which had no mention :(. It felt like he was trying to cram as many 80's references in at once, which other reviewers have also noticed, as well as commenting that it took away from the story and pacing - which I can agree with. 

Nothing in the book happened in the film, other than the big fight. I have not watched the film in a couple years, but I reckon that the reason for the fight is different, but overall similar. The premise of the two were the same - but I think that Mr Movie decided that watching a bunch of people play joystick games were not as exciting as a race. Although I do remember that they do a singular joystick arcade game at the end. I think that was more for comedic purposes as the whole film was more fast paced before that. Anyways. 

3/5