A Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

If you are a movie enthusiast, then you probably have heard, or seen, Stephen Spielberg's new movie, Ready Player One. The movie is an adaptation of a science fiction novel of the same name, written by Ernest Cline. The novel, Ready Player One, was published in 2011 and it won multiple awards.

I thought the movie was ok, but it piqued my curiosity about the book, and so I read it last week. What I discovered was that the book and the movie are almost completely different to each other, and while the movie was ok, but the book is great.

Synopsis:

It is 2045 and the reality is ugly and harsh; global warming, energy crisis, and pollutions sent the economy into a neverending contraction, and the unemployment rate rocketed skyhigh. In this new world, most people are living in poverty and misery. This is why people are escaping into OASIS - a virtual reality where you can live, work, and study, as anyone you wish to be.

Life, in 2045, is a humongous, MMORPG!

Like the billions of people on the planet, Wade Watts is another lonely soul who only feels alive when he is jacked into OASIS. Wade has dedicated his life to solving the greatest challenge in OASIS. The challenge was created by James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, and it consists of puzzles based on the 1980 pop culture that Halliday was obsessed with. Whoever can be the first to solve the challenge can also win the ultimate prize, inheriting all of Halliday's wealths as well as the control of OASIS itself.

For the first time in the human history, being a pop culture geek gives you an advantage in life, because you stand a chance at winning the challenge and become the most powerful person on the planet. Like many of his fellow geeks, Wade dreamed of being the winner. But when Wade became the first person to solve the first puzzle, he discovered a shadowy force who will stop at nothing to win Halliday's prize, even if it means turning OASIS, a video game, into a game of life and death...

My thoughs on this book:

If you:

• are a science fiction fan
• are fond of cyberpunk fictions
• are a geek of the 1980s pop culture
• like a a good story
• are the kind of person who likes to think about technological advancements and its impacts on  the society, so on and so forth.

Then you will love this book, just like I did.

Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation was good, but it was more of a family friendly, action adventure film that wowed the audiences with glorious CGI. But story wise, I thought the movie was average. If you have seen the movie and you liked it, then I would highly recommend reading the book. Actually, if you haven't seen the movie then I would highly recommend that you read the book before you watch the movie. Why? This book rocks.

I mentioned in my intro, that the novel is almost completely different to the movie. I am not going into a detailed discussion about the differences between the movie and the book. After all, I am writing a book review, not an article comparing the book to the movie. In my review I will mostly be talking about what I liked about the book, and occasionally mentioning how it differs from the movie.

Ready Player One is a science fiction novel with elements of cyberpunk, this is a sub-genre with defining characteristics such as a combination of high tech and low life. The common theme in Cyberpunk is where the technology advances too rapidly for the society to catch up, and therefore it causes radical changes, or breakdowns, in the social order. The cyberpunk world is also Orwellian, where the government is often weak and corrupt, and powers are often in the hands of a few wealthy elites. Meanwhile, the inhabitants in a cyberpunk world often experience social problems, such as a big gap between the rich and the poor, loneliness, drug abuse, so on and so forth. Furthermore, the technology in cyberpunk fictions is usually not far-fetched, but a near-future projection from where we are today, featuring technologies such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics. The prominent examples for cyberpunk, are books written by authors like Philip K. Dick, Richard Morgan, as well as movies and TVs such as Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Altered Carbon.

I am not a huge fan for sci-fi, but the rebel in me drove me to love cyberpunk. This is because the subgenre is prophetic and thought provoking, and my personal view is that unless we can change the way do and think about things, then at the current trajectory we are heading to a cyberpunk future, and it will not be a bright future. 

How does cyberpunk fit into Ready Player One?

This book explores loneliness and escapism, and the story is set in a future world where our existing economic model, one that achieves growths by expending resources, begins to contract due to resource shortages and global warming. As a result, there is mass poverty and unemployment. In the world of Ready Player One, real life becomes unbearable, and people escape into a virtual world instead to live, work, and study. After all, in the virtual world things aren't so bad.

This book placed a heavy emphasis on depicting, what it is like to be living in such a world, and it really hits you, a reader, in your ethos and pathos. But this is also why the book is far superior to the movie adaptation, because the movie glossed over the aspects of living in such a world, and the story lost much of its power in comparison to its source material.

In other words, the book is a cyberpunk masterpiece, but the movie is a action adventure, pop corn flick.

There is nothing wrong with a fun movie, but I am just surprised at how much of the story's meaning is lost in the process of adapting it into a movie. Anyway, on the bedrock of VR technology and a torrent of 1980 pop culture references, this book explores loneliness and escapism, not in a mocking and disdaining tone, but it humanizes escapism, it peels back the layers surrounding the issue, and then asking the readers two questions:

1. What made Wade lonely?
2. What made Wade happy in the end?

I will leave my would-be readers to enjoy the book and come to their own interpretations. But it suffices to say, the story didn't blame technology and entertainment as the sources for loneliness. Instead, this story argues that the cause for our loneliness, and its solution, rest in something  more fundamental to our human nature. What is it? I encourage you to read this book and find your own conclusions.  

Some readers may disagree with the views being presented in this book, and that is fine. Even then, given the context of the present day, this book is still worth reading because the subject matter is interesting and it affects us all. Meanwhile, for those who have seen the movie but haven't read the book, then I will highly recommend reading the book, because the story that was originally envisioned by Ernest Cline is so much richer than the movie adaptation.