It’s been a while since I read a science fiction book that
was just pure fun as much as it’s clever.
On the surface, the premise seems a bit pandering: It’s
2041, and the world has been over thirty years in the grips of the Great Recession.
Most people spend most of their free time in the greatest, most
massively-multiplayer virtual world ever created –sort of a bigger version of World of Warcraft- called OASIS. Pretty
much all gaming and sci-fi and fantasy worlds you can think of have been ported
into this massive virtual multiverse, and players can move from planet to
planet (and fantasy to fantasy) via Star
Trek like teleport pads or any space ship from almost any science fiction
film created. Designed and created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, OASIS
becomes the solution for many who seek to escape the real world. But when Halliday
learns he is dying –and with no heirs or other family- decides to leave his
vast fortune (something like $240 billion) to anyone who can solve where he hidden
an Easter Egg within the vast universe of OASIS. But years later, no one has
figured out the puzzle, and thus the only ones who seem interested are people
called “gunters,” a subculture of people who’ve become obsessed with Halliday
and who spend hours upon hours going through everything he wrote and reliving
almost every aspect of the 1980’s, because Halliday was fascinated with 80s pop
and nerd culture of all kinds, including sci-fi, fantasy, anime, Giant Robot
Japanese shows, Duran Duran, videogames and Dungeons & Dragons. So all the
challenges, all the riddles involve trivia from that era, so Ready Player One becomes a massive
mash-up of Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory and The Matrix (as USA
Today called it) and Stephenson’s Snow
Crash and other novels that feature a treasure hunt premise. Our hero and
narrator, Wade Watts, is an awkward teenager, poor, over-weight, with acne and
is living with his aunt in what amounts to future version of a trailer park,
where RVs are stacked upon each other twenty or more trailers high to preserve
ground space (which is a very clever idea, in my opinion). Like all gunters, he
too seeks to solve the riddles and gain the fortune that will take him away
from the world he currently lives in. Then one day, Wade stumbles upon the
first clue in Halliday’s game and sets in motion a race to the finish. But
there are some, including a huge corporation, that is willing to do anything,
including kill people, to get control of the money and OASIS itself.
This is a delightful novel, fast-paced page turner and surprisingly
well constructed. Debut novelist Ernest Cline –who wrote the screenplay for the
little seen (but worth it) indie film Fanboys-
spent much of his young adulthood working a series of low-paying tech support
jobs that allowed him to surf the Internet while on the clock and research his
many pop-culture obsessions. His love of the 1980’s shines with endless nods to
almost every popular pop culture event that made that decade my favorite as
well.
In the end, Ready
Player One is pure escapism, yet there is coda to it as well, but it does
not interfere with the pacing. One thing that interests me is that Cline sold
the rights to Warner Bros and I’m curious how the studio and Cline (who is
writing the screenplay) intend to use the multi copyrighted material of other companies
and studios. I mean the holders might not want to sign the rights over, but if
handled right, this could be a great movie the same way Toy Story was. Everyone knows the story of Mattel not allowing
Barbie to be used in the first film, only to realize what money the lost by not
allowing Pixar to use her –so the quickly acquiesced for the later films.
As huge fan of the 1980s and classic video games, Ready Player One is a valentine to the
era and an enjoyable trip to those halcyon days.
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