REVIEW: Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

• year first released: 2011
• ISBN of the version I read: 9780307887443
• publisher of the version I read: Crown/Archetype
• my rating (out of 5): 3

If you’re interested in reading Ready Player One, the best thing you can do for yourself, first of all, is forget all the hype.

Yes, Ready Player One is a very fun book. Certainly it has the potential to make an amusing, bombastic sci-fi movie. (Generally we can trust Spielberg for this, so I’m going to assume the movie will be worthwhile.)

Is it a great book, though? – no, not especially.

The plot is really just a steroided, nerdfest mix of two tropes you’ve already heard:

1. The world has turned to garbage, so everyone lives inside a mondo virtual reality simulator with limitless possibilities.
2. An eccentric billionaire doesn’t have any heirs, so he sets up an enormous quest: whoever completes the quest first gets the money.

On top of this, Cline’s writing is perfectly average. Nothing about his style – his word choice, sentence structure, use of analogy and metaphor, etc. – is in any way outstanding. There’s nothing, per se, wrong with how he wrote this book. It’s fine. It won’t leave you in awe of his skills as a writer, though.

The biggest selling point to Ready Player One is clearly its overwhelming dose of 80’s nostalgia. If you loved it in the 80’s, you’ll find it in this book.

Or so I’m told.

The problem for me, personally, is that I was born halfway through the 80’s – which means that the nostalgia part of my brain kicks in sometime in the 90’s and, subsequently, only a fraction of the pop culture references that absolutely flood the book resonate with me. Yes, I’ve seen Back to the Future. I’ve played Pac-Man. I know what tabletop RPG’s are. I’m familiar with the original Atari – and am basically aware of its importance in the video game industry – but I’ve never actually put my hands on one.

I suppose if you were born in the 70’s – or just earlier in the 80's than I was – Ready Player One might hit you in all the right warm fuzzies. But for someone like me – born just a bit too late – I think much of the effect is lost.

That said, I don’t want to belittle how entertaining the book is. It’s certainly a fun way to spend a few hours, so long as you are willing to settle for perfectly average writing. The puzzles are entertaining. The minor contradictions are forgivable - though there are many of them. I was sincerely rooting for the main character and his friends. If you're hoping for sci-fi with more "literary value," though, you're better of sticking with Clarke, Heinlein, or Bradbury. 

(Let me point out: If you read my post Books v. Movies, you'll see that this book will probably make a better movie than a book. Frankly, I suspect strongly that this book was always destined to be a movie. I'm definitely going to check it out, when the time comes.)