Book Review: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (2011)

Some book ideas are so good that the book just seems to write itself, and my guess is that this is how Ernest Cline felt when he came up with the idea for Ready Player One. Cline is a true American nerd, born in 1972 in Ashland, Ohio -- a great time and place to have been born as a nerd, just at the beginning of the computer and sci-fi revolutions. Cline is the sort of person who, in 1996, wrote a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension and posted it on the Internet (it has since been taken down). If that sentence gives you good feelings about Cline, then you will like his work. He wrote a screenplay called Fanboys about a group of Star Wars geeks who decide to break into George Lucas's ranch to steal a print of The Phantom Menace before it is released to the public (boy, they must have been disappointed). According to Wikipedia, he wrote another screenplay (which apparently has not been made into a movie yet) called Thundercade about a video-game junkie in his 30's who learns that a young gamer has broken a record he set as a teenager, and who travels with his friends to the world's largest gaming championship to restore his glory. Do you see the pattern yet?

Fortunately for Cline, he has come along at a time when nerds are apparently tired of reading about cool guys having adventures and are ready to be the heroes of their own stories. TV shows like Chuck and The Big Bang Theory have already had fun with this concept. But Cline's new book has managed a clever twist on the old set-up -- a much more clever twist, as far as I can tell, then he had in his two screenplays.

The set-up for Ready Player One -- and by far the best part of the whole book -- is this: Approximately 30 years from now, our modern civilization has largely collapsed. Due to the usual Daily Show worries about American life -- climate change, the energy crisis, poor schools (basically everything liberals have worried about since around 1973) -- most Americans live crowded lives of near Third-World squalor. The only good thing left about the country is a wonderful online role-playing game called OASIS. Virtually everyone spends most of their time in this imaginary world, which has made its creator (a recluse named James Halliday) impossibly rich. But when Halliday dies, his will reveals that he has left his controlling interest in OASIS -- an interest that will immediately make its owner the wealthiest person on earth -- to whoever can find some sort of doodad that he has hidden inside the game. And here's the catch: Halliday was himself a child of mid-America in the 1970s and was (you guessed it) obsessed with 1980's nerd culture. So to win the prize, millions of people all over the planet become experts in things like Family Ties, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, and, of course, Monty Python.

This combination of three geek obsessions -- a future dystopia, role-playing games, and 1980's trivia -- creates what has been accurately described by sci-fi writer John Scalzi as a "nerdgasm." And, to be honest, your interest in Ready Player One will ultimately turn on how much you enjoy the premise. Cline is a pedestrian author. He is pretty much incapable of following the "show don't tell" rule of writing, and long portions of the book read like excerpts from the film treatment that was presumably the basis for this work. Also, his characters are immediately recognizable as good guys (nerds and people who are nice to nerds) and bad guys (anyone who has a job that requires them to show up on time and be functional from 9 AM to 6 PM). I would be stunned if anyone over the age of five were genuinely surprised by anything that happens in this book.

But these comments do not do justice to the humor and joy with which Cline has attacked his project. The man knows his nerds, and anyone who has a working familiarity with that culture will have a lot of fun seeing what Cline does with old favorites like Wargames, the rock band Rush, and Ultraman. (I wish Cline could have worked SCTV into the book, but of course he was too young to have seen it in its glory.) There are also great scenes of video game play that any gamer will enjoy. (Number 2 son ripped through the whole book in about a day, and thoroughly enjoyed it.) And if the plot is somewhat two-dimensional and unrealistic -- well, that is true of countless nerd favorites, from Star Wars to Spider-Man. If you like the premise, you'll like the book. You can't ask fairer than that.

My own reading, however, left me with two annoyances that I would like to raise. First, given their obsession with political dystopias, I am frustrated that almost no one in the sci-fi / fantasy crowd has the least understanding of politics and how they actually work. Their only idea is to exaggerate whatever aspects in modern life they don't like in order to create a dystopia, and then to make up some magical amulet (the Force, a video game) to make things right. One of the problems with the three Star Wars prequels was that when George Lucas turned his attention from the Saturday matinee shootouts that dominated the original movies to give some sort of explanation as to how his galaxy got into such a mess, his analysis of Old Republic politics was simplistic, unrealistic, and absurd. Similarly, the whole set-up of Ready Player One requires us to believe that the U.S. government is virtually non-functional, and that almost all power has gone to a few high-powered corporations. But if this were really the case, then his plot would be impossible, because the evil corporations could persuade the corrupt judicial system to throw out the will and simply give them control of OASIS. Cline would no doubt say that I'm over-thinking his story, but it always annoys me when the sci-fi /fantasy folks spend so much time on figuring out how the blasters work in their particular universe, and so little time trying to understand human nature.

Second, I was left with great sadness for the poor education that almost everyone in the United States received during the 1970's and 1980's. Across America you had literally thousands of extremely bright boys who were, for the most part, bored out of their minds because we had nothing to do. How many of us were given an education worthy of our time and talents? Very few. The Founding Fathers were taught Greek and Latin, they could run huge farms, build furniture and houses, conduct ground-breaking scientific experiments, and quote Shakespeare and the Bible by the hour. How many of even the brightest 40-somethings today could do the same? Read the speeches of FDR or John Kennedy, read any major magazine published before 1968, pick up well-known detective stories from the 1930's, and you will find yourself in a world of gracious and well-organized prose, a world grounded in history, and poetry, and an appreciation of art and beauty. Compare any of these documents to a modern example, and you will find a depressing drop-off. We weren't taught about history, or about foreign languages, or about the great minds of the past, or about how to write a good sentence. Desperate to fill their heads with anything, and not knowing how to tell good from bad, kids in the 1970's and 1980's soaked up the stuff in Cline's book: old Japanese cartoons, sit-coms, Hollywood movies, comic books, and the lyrics of pop songs. And that's what the best minds of our generation learned; most folks didn't even get that. Some of us had parents who gave us more, and we were lucky, but parents can only do so much -- our society expected very little from our education, and that is what most of us got. It's a shame, and we will have to hope that our children do better, but at least it prepared us to enjoy Ready Player One.