book review for ready player one

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A Future Wrapped in 1980s Culture

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By Janet Maslin

• Aug. 14, 2011

Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One” is a book filled with references to video games, virtual reality, ’80s pop-culture trivia, geek heroes like E. Gary Gygax, and funny-sounding cult items like Frobozz and Raaka-Tu. Yet it works for people who like books without pictures too.

Mr. Cline is photographed on the jacket standing in front of an open-flapped DeLorean, like the one in “Back to the Future.” He looks a bit like the filmmaker Kevin Smith, one of the few people on the planet who may be capable of catching all of Mr. Cline’s geekoid references. (Mr. Cline himself wrote the screenplay for the 2009 film “Fanboys,” about unusually fanatical “Star Wars” devotees.) Another is the science-fiction writer John Scalzi, who has aptly referred to “Ready Player One” as a “nerdgasm.” There can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture.

With its Pac-Man-style cover graphics and vintage Atari mind-set “Ready Player One” certainly looks like a genre item. But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative. He sets it in 2044, when there aren’t many original Duran Duran fans still afoot, and most students of 1980s trivia are zealous kids. They are interested in that time period because a billionaire inventor, James Halliday, died and left behind a mischievous legacy. Whoever first cracks Halliday’s series of ’80s-related riddles, clues and puzzles that are included in a film called “Anorak’s Invitation” will inherit his fortune.

Halliday was “the video-game designer responsible for creating the Oasis, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis,” Mr. Cline writes. Part of what has made Oasis so attractive is that real life on an impoverished, resource-depleted Earth has grown increasingly grim. So the characters in “Ready Player One” spend their time as avatars bewitched by online role playing. They live as shut-ins and don’t know one another in the flesh. Art3mis, the hot-looking blogger and warrior who becomes the novel’s heroine, may actually be an overweight middle-aged guy named Chuck.

The book’s narrator is a school kid named Wade Watts, whose parents at least had the foresight to give him the alliterative name of a superhero. But Wade’s real circumstances are not exciting. He lives in a tall block of stacked mobile homes and escapes to an abandoned van to adopt his online persona. He goes to school because he has to; his video console and virtual-reality visor will be taken away if he flunks out. But his school avatar is often seen slumped at its desk, sleeping. That’s because Wade is busy being an alter ego called Parzival. Like Art3mis he spells his name funny because the other spellings are already taken.

Wade is obsessed with “Anorak’s Invitation,” not least because there’s something fishy about it: the extras seen with Halliday have been digitally borrowed from old John Hughes films . There’s no knowing what actually happened to Halliday. But Halliday’s knowledge of 1980s trivia was so thorough that Wade is determined to match it. (As a full-time gamer he is competitive by nature. And what else has he got to do?) So he knows everything about every episode of “Family Ties” and every coin-operated arcade game. “Ready Player One” takes its title, sentimentally, from the phrase that signaled the start of games from that era.

In “Anorak’s Invitation” Halliday mentions one of his sentimental favorites, the Atari game Adventure, and the Easter egg that its creator, Warren Robinett, incorporated into it. And now it’s time to start looking things up, if you are hooked by Mr. Cline’s premise but unfamiliar with his huge frame of reference. An Easter egg is a secret sign or clue or whatnot that may be embedded in a game, and Halliday has deliberately created an occasion for egg hunting. A great many egg hunters, known as “gunters” for short, do nothing but try to find Halliday’s eggs. Reader, ask yourself: Would you be interested in Wade’s story if you weren’t sure he was smarter than all the other guys?

Because Wade needs at least a few friends, he bonds with Art3mis and three other avatars. They become known as the High Five when they start racking up high numbers on the cosmic scoreboard. Mr. Cline describes their progress with a winking appreciation of the culture clash that ensues when Wade, a humble schoolboy, reaches the Tomb of Horrors to lock antlers with Acererack the Demi-Lich from Dungeons & Dragons. But “Ready Player One” crosses a line here, when its virtual-reality fetish leads it into Dungeons & Dragons for real.

The book gets off to a witty start, with Wade and his cronies slinging insults about one another’s knowledge of fantasy films and using ’80s-vintage movie quips like “Don’t call me Shirley.” ( From “Airplane!” of course.) And if they are capable of arguing endlessly about “Star Wars” trivia, they’re also living in a 27-sector virtual-reality world arranged like a Rubik’s Cube and where the “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” realms are right next door to each other. (See “nerdgasm,” above.) So the breadth and cleverness of Mr. Cline’s imagination gets this daydream pretty far. But there comes a point when it’s clear that Wade lacks at least one dimension, and that gaming has overwhelmed everything else about this book.

Still it will be interesting to see how “Ready Player One” becomes (as is planned) a movie based on a book about songs, TV shows, games and movies. And when lines like “Continue your quest by taking the test” are said out loud.

READY PLAYER ONE

By Ernest Cline

374 pages. Crown Publishers. $24.

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READY PLAYER ONE

by Ernest Cline ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2011

Too much puzzle-solving, not enough suspense.

Video-game players embrace the quest of a lifetime in a virtual world; screenwriter Cline’s first novel is old wine in new bottles. 

The real world, in 2045, is the usual dystopian horror story. So who can blame Wade, our narrator, if he spends most of his time in a virtual world? The 18-year-old, orphaned at 11, has no friends in his vertical trailer park in Oklahoma City, while the OASIS has captivating bells and whistles, and it’s free. Its creator, the legendary billionaire James Halliday, left a curious will. He had devised an elaborate online game, a hunt for a hidden Easter egg. The finder would inherit his estate. Old-fashioned riddles lead to three keys and three gates. Wade, or rather his avatar Parzival, is the first gunter (egg-hunter) to win the Copper Key, first of three. Halliday was obsessed with the pop culture of the 1980s, primarily the arcade games, so the novel is as much retro as futurist. Parzival’s great strength is that he has absorbed all Halliday’s obsessions; he knows by heart three essential movies, crossing the line from geek to freak. His most formidable competitors are the Sixers, contract gunters working for the evil conglomerate IOI, whose goal is to acquire the OASIS. Cline’s narrative is straightforward but loaded with exposition. It takes a while to reach a scene that crackles with excitement: the meeting between Parzival (now world famous as the lead contender) and Sorrento, the head of IOI. The latter tries to recruit Parzival; when he fails, he issues and executes a death threat. Wade’s trailer is demolished, his relatives killed; luckily Wade was not at home. Too bad this is the dramatic high point. Parzival threads his way between more ’80s games and movies to gain the other keys; it’s clever but not exciting. Even a romance with another avatar and the ultimate “epic throwdown” fail to stir the blood.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-88743-6

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011

SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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by Ernest Cline

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SEEN & HEARD

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA

by TJ Klune ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.

Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune ( The Art of Breathing , 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | FANTASY

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by TJ Klune

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Parents' guide to, ready player one.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 33 Reviews
• Kids Say 108 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Exciting, funny, futuristic thriller about online games.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this humorous science fiction thriller deals with a high-stakes online contest that mixes puzzles with video game violence. Set in a depressed future United States, where most people escape into virtual reality, it features a bunch of tough-talking teens fighting to keep their online…

Why Age 15+?

The gamers engage in "trash talk" during their encounters and use variations of

The villains blow up the trailer park where the protagonist's aunt lives, but th

Most characters in this futuristic world have very few material possessions, but

Alcohol use and smoking are lightly depicted in some of the online settings.

Some flirting and speculation of what the real bodies of the players might look

Any Positive Content?

Protagonist Wade and his online cohorts are brave and resourceful, determined to

The protagonist learns that he must rely on the help of others if he has any cha

The narrative is filled with trivia about the 1980s and the early days of comput

The gamers engage in "trash talk" during their encounters and use variations of "f--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

The villains blow up the trailer park where the protagonist's aunt lives, but the protagonist learns the news second-hand. A secondary character is thrown out a window, but the act is not depicted.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Most characters in this futuristic world have very few material possessions, but many gamers try to save enough money to afford expensive computer peripherals. The online world is full of consumer items that can be purchased with virtual credits.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Some flirting and speculation of what the real bodies of the players might look like. In one chapter, there's mention of blow-up sex dolls, online brothels, and masturbation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Role Models

Protagonist Wade and his online cohorts are brave and resourceful, determined to keep the OASIS gaming world free for all citizens.

Positive Messages

The protagonist learns that he must rely on the help of others if he has any chance of winning the contest. He also discovers the pleasures of life outside a computer simulation.

Educational Value

The narrative is filled with trivia about the 1980s and the early days of computer gaming.

Parents need to know that this humorous science fiction thriller deals with a high-stakes online contest that mixes puzzles with video game violence. Set in a depressed future United States, where most people escape into virtual reality, it features a bunch of tough-talking teens fighting to keep their online playground out of the hands of an evil corporation.

Where to Read

Parent and kid reviews.

• Parents say (33)
• Kids say (108)

Based on 33 parent reviews

One of my all-time favorites, but for kids, save it for high school

This is the best book ever made, what's the story.

Like nearly everyone on the depleted, depressed Planet Earth, high school student Wade Watts dreams of winning the untold billions at stake in a contest devised by James Halliday, late inventor of OASIS, the immersive virtual utopia that allows anyone to plug in and leave the real world behind. Obsessed with Reagan-era pop culture and technology, Halliday creates a series of puzzles that can only be solved by someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, player-vs.-player fighting strategies, and the software mogul's own personal history. As the stakes grow higher and players begin to die in the real world, Wade must decide whether he can trust anyone else in his quest for the ultimate prize.

Is It Any Good?

Layered with inside jokes and sly references that will appeal to a wide range of readers, READY PLAYER ONE is a smart, funny thriller that both celebrates and critiques online culture. The author is accomplished at developing suspense even though much of the narrative is set in virtual reality. The puzzles are intriguing, the action is intense, and the payoff at the end is worth all the buildup.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about making predictions of the future based on current trends. Does the setting of the book seem plausible? What assumptions is the author making about changes in politics and economics between now and 2044?

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of having so much information available 24/7? How might near-ubiquitous social media affect our culture?

The protagonist, Wade Watts, spends a lot of time hiding his location and true identity. How do his precautions compare to the strategies you use to work online safely?

Do you think the contest in the novel could really be solved by one person working entirely alone? What are the advantages or disadvantages of working as a team?

Book Details

• Author : Ernest Cline
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : STEM
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Crown Publishing Group
• Publication date : August 16, 2011
• Number of pages : 376
• Last updated : June 10, 2015

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Ready Player One

By ernest cline, a nostalgic romp but only for geeky white dudes.

The Spielberg trailer for the upcoming Ready Player One movie was recently released, so I knew I needed to finally read this book that had been quietly collecting dust on my shelf for the last few years.

If Willy Wonka loved the 80s and video games instead of candy, the result would be this book. In Ready Player One, Wade Watts — screen name Parzival — is one of the countless people looking to find a treasure hidden inside the virtual reality simulation environment, “OASIS,” that now dominates everyone’s lives. The reward up for grabs is billions of dollars and control over the OASIS ecosystem. OASIS was built by Jim Halliday, a geek and 80’s fanatic, so finding this treasure, an “Easter Egg” in video game parlance, requires mastery of the classic games Halliday played and knowing arcane facts about the things Halliday loved.

Meanwhile, an all-powerful corporate conglomerate, the IOI, has set out to win the competition as well, using whatever means necessary to wrest control over the ubiquitous OS into their evil grasp. The game, then, is set up and for the most part proceeds along as you would expect, but of course, the point is always the journey.

From Zork to Monty Python to Dungeons & Dragons and DeLoreans and Joust , the geeky references are endless. And I do mean endless. I ended up skimming a few sections that were just name after name of arcane old stuff. If you were to take those things out of the book though, there wouldn’t be much left to it. There’s some amount of inventiveness to imagining this virtual world, but beyond that, the world of Ready Player One is not particularly well-fleshed out. The global economy has collapsed due to depletion of natural resources and an energy crisis, the book tells us, and some elements of social order and public schools and other things like that have gone down with it. Beyond that, details of how this world functions are mostly left up to your own imagination. The virtual world gets a much meatier treatment but it’s basically a more technologically advanced and all-encompassing version of Second Life and WOW mixed together (Wade’s full name is Wade Owen Watts, of course).

Point is, the references are basically what Ready Player One is good for, so depending on your level of interest in those things, this may or may not be an interesting book for you. The book is at times entertaining, but largely predictable. The book’s cult status is not surprising, considering the layers upon layers of nostalgia to dig through in the quest for the ultimate prize. I’m sure it’ll make for a colorful movie.

I was born too late into the 80’s to appreciate a lot of the references, and the book is very, very guy-centric (which I am not). Literally, there’s a list of authors and directors that “Halliday” likes, the entirety of which consists of a straight list of 29 old white dudes (In case you doubt me: “Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.” “Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith.”) In fact, despite there being hundreds of references to bands, movies, videogames and various other media, I don’t think you could name more than a couple (if any) that mention anything that is represented by a female protagonist or frontman.

Overall, I found this book pretty forgettable. There’s not much emotional resonance in this journey, but it’s not that kind of book, so that’s not a big deal. I thought I would like it since I really enjoyed Robin Sloane’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (which is also very nerdy-dude-ish), but I think it was missing the sense of humor that the Sloane novel had. Ready Player One takes itself a little too seriously for a book that mostly consists of a list of dorky shoutouts. I’d say if you are a nerdy older white dude (child of the 80’s), you will probably love this. Everyone else can probably just watch the movie.

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16 comments

Share your thoughts cancel reply.

I thought this book was really fun! Excited to see it become a movie!

This is one of the books on my tbr list I can’t wait to get round to reading it

Hope you enjoy it! Thanks for visiting!

I got this book as an ARC at bookcon in 2015. Didnt think I would like it….boy was I wrong! It was awesome!

Always cool to get those ARCs! I’m looking forward to the movie!

I completely agree with your review! I was born much to late to understand any of the references, although I did think that the book did have some interesting parts! Overall wonderful review!

Thank you! I mean, I’m well aware I’m in the minority of people by not really loving the book, haha — I think I just had really high expectations going in since I had heard so much about it beforehand. Thanks for dropping by!

Thanks for the review! I will likely wait til the film’s release, but perhaps I will get to this book in the future depending on the film’s quality.

That’s probably a good idea — I’d be surprised if the movie wasn’t good though, I mean it’s Steven Spielberg and I could actually see the plot of this book being better for a movie than for a book.

It’s nice to see a dissenting opinion on this book!

As a geeky white dude born in the early 80s I really enjoyed this when I first read it, but I totally understand why someone outside that demographic would not really get much out of this. In the context of a dystopian internet world I thought the references were fun (since I got the majority of them) and forgivable, but I do agree the author did lean on them really hard.

With that in mind, I was hugely disappointed by Cline’s second novel, Armada. He essentially doubled down on the references to the point that there was absolutely no substance beyond them. To speak to your criticisms above, it bothered me that his characters in this book (regardless of age, nationality, orientation, and gender) were all really the same person who loved all the things the author does. Why not go into other fandoms if you’re going that heavily into relying on references? It just didn’t make sense and the book came off feeling like a cheap play on nostalgia to cash in on his target audience. So much so that it made me question my initial love for Ready Player One!

I am not super optimistic about the upcoming movie and it will be interesting to see what kind of appeal it has. I would have thought it wouldn’t have been a commercially viable adaptation, but perhaps I’m underestimating the spending power of his demographic.

Hey thanks for your comments — disappointed to hear that Armada is more of the same but ramped up, but I’d really recommend Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore if you’re looking for a book with some geeky references but also a more involved plot, etc. Happy reading! :)

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll add that to my list!

Thanks for the recommendation of the Sloane book; I liked Ready Player One, and if you liked that one better I’ll definitely need to check it out!

This is one of my favourite books! I hope the film does it justice!

While I think I enjoyed it more than you did, I totally get you on the reference thing. I didn’t get most of them, but my husband did (cue entrance of geeky white male here), so your take is DEFINITELY on point!

I’m glad you enjoyed! I definitely didn’t dislike it! I think it just didn’t resonate as much with me or stick with me the way I was expecting it to, considering how much people love it. Thanks for dropping by and thanks for your thoughts! :)