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A review by mburnamfink
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
4.0
Stop me if you've heard this one before. In the real world, Wade Watts is nobody, just a poor kid living in a slum on a dying Earth. But in the virtual world of the OASIS, he's Parzival, a hero questing after a holy grail. See, Halliday, the guy who invented the OASIS died and left his fortune and godlike admin powers to whoever could solve a series of opaque puzzles hidden in various Easter Eggs. Halliday was obsessed with the 80s pop culture of his youth, and the puzzles are based on that, leading to a mass nostalgic hunt through the past that Wade excels at with his deep base of trivia and skill at antique video games. Ready player One is a fast-paced power fantasy that's a decent bit of adventure fluff. It's also a existentialist horror novel.
Simulation and Simulacra. A copy with no original
The whole métier of Ready player One is nerd trivia. I actually like a lot of 80s stuff, like new wave music and classic synth pop, Dungeons & Dragons, Back to the Future, Real Genius and Commando. I'm even listening to the shameless neon drenched nostalgia of NEW RETRO WAVE as a I write this review. But this is just stuff I like.
In Ready player One 80s pop culture becomes a kind of fundamentalist ur-text, with the idea that obsessive memorization of a decade of mostly crap (Sturgeon's Law always applies, kids) somehow will make you an Actual Wizard, Harry. Wade is a decent enough guy, and does his fellow egg hunters a solid at the end when he wins, but there's no there "there", if you catch my drift. Wade's knowledge of the 80s is like the mental abilities of the Shas Pollak, who could tell which word on a specific page a pin inserted through the Talmud would hit, but who is in all other aspects a mediocre scholar.
Wade treats 80s emphemera like holy writ, and while in the story his obsessive knowledge brings him power, it doesn't bring any meaning, beyond "these things exist". Wade could have learned some lessons about confidence, coolness, friendship, imagination, or stubbornness, but nah, it's just a "media, created by XYZ in 198*". Ready player One smooth assurance that style matters more than substance is its own perfect anthesis, a stunning indictment of "fan culture" through the present moment.
And it's also a fun book about a geek who gets virtual giant robot and uses it to beat up an army of corporate drones before he gets the girl.
Simulation and Simulacra. A copy with no original
The whole métier of Ready player One is nerd trivia. I actually like a lot of 80s stuff, like new wave music and classic synth pop, Dungeons & Dragons, Back to the Future, Real Genius and Commando. I'm even listening to the shameless neon drenched nostalgia of NEW RETRO WAVE as a I write this review. But this is just stuff I like.
In Ready player One 80s pop culture becomes a kind of fundamentalist ur-text, with the idea that obsessive memorization of a decade of mostly crap (Sturgeon's Law always applies, kids) somehow will make you an Actual Wizard, Harry. Wade is a decent enough guy, and does his fellow egg hunters a solid at the end when he wins, but there's no there "there", if you catch my drift. Wade's knowledge of the 80s is like the mental abilities of the Shas Pollak, who could tell which word on a specific page a pin inserted through the Talmud would hit, but who is in all other aspects a mediocre scholar.
Wade treats 80s emphemera like holy writ, and while in the story his obsessive knowledge brings him power, it doesn't bring any meaning, beyond "these things exist". Wade could have learned some lessons about confidence, coolness, friendship, imagination, or stubbornness, but nah, it's just a "media, created by XYZ in 198*". Ready player One smooth assurance that style matters more than substance is its own perfect anthesis, a stunning indictment of "fan culture" through the present moment.
And it's also a fun book about a geek who gets virtual giant robot and uses it to beat up an army of corporate drones before he gets the girl.