Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
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I'm leaving a review at all because I really passionately hate it. It's probably one of the worst books I have ever read.
As a disclaimer, this isn't a book that appealed to me a whole lot conceptually. I did my dissertation on cyberpunk media and this was one of the books I read for it, and I really wish I'd read some of the other books I'd bought and never ended up getting round to instead. I finished it only because I couldn't let such a terrible book beat me.
The book follows Wade Watts, an insufferable young man, as he competes to find an Easter egg within the OASIS - the MMORPG everyone plays in Cline's vision of the future - and win a whole load of money. Wade is very poor and very sad and so he wants to win the fortune, and because he knows so much about video games and 80s culture (much like the creator of the game), he wins, obviously, and he kisses the girl he likes and everything is lovely and happy. A lot of critical literature I read for my dissertation spoke about how cyberpunk as a whole had a tendency to be a way for nerdy guys to write a fantasy story where they were really cool and powerful as a direct result for their nerdiness, and I'd say this particularly applies here.
The misogyny is really out there. It's that weird "nice guy" flavour of misogyny. Apparently, all the girls in the OASIS have avatars that either look like supermodels (read: too skinny for Cline's self-insert) or porn stars (read: too "fake" and large-breasted for Cline's self-insert). The girl Wade likes isn't like that. She's curvy. Nerdy, too. And Wade saves all the pictures of her avatar that she posts and stalks her obsessively for years, because, you know, normal behaviour. Yes, of course he ends up dating her. No, he never faces consequences for being a massive creep, unless you count a falling-out they have at one point where he wins her affection back by stalking her some more. As in, she blocks him on everything, stops posting on her very popular blog, so he visits her in-game home repeatedly to harass her, because he reckons that's really romantic. I reiterate: he never faces consequences for this.
Similarly, there's a degree of racism, mostly in the characters of Daito and Shoto, who are always going on about "honour" and are essentially walking stereotypes. Daito gets "disappeared" by Generic Big Evil Corporation in the real world, and Wade asks if he could have possibly killed himself after losing access to his avatar (on which he had made good progress in the Easter egg hunt, and maybe you can only have one avatar, I don't recall). Shoto says "No, Daito did not commit seppuku," because, you know, he's Japanese. Not like seppuku is a very specific form of ritual suicide or anything. The scene is meant to be very serious and dark, to my recollection, and it feels like a weird joke that doesn't land.
There was a missed opportunity, I think, in that Wade would have made a good main character for something satirical, or at least something where the overall goal of the story was for him to grow from his mistakes. Instead, he remains whiny, immature, and generally dislikable, and the most character growth we see is probably after a point where he becomes depressed and stays inside masturbating constantly, and eventually decides to stop doing that.
The book relies on the reader thinking "Hey, I get that reference!" very, very heavily, and so most scenes that are clearly meant to be really cool and epic end up reading as⊠a bit sad, honestly. I have my own niche and/or obsessive interests, and will never put people down for loving a franchise or whatever, but "Ooh, my car is the DeLorean from Back to the Future and also the Knight Rider car and it has the Ghostbusters numberplate!" is just, I don't know. A bit much, maybe. A bit fanfic.
The book tries to have a vaguely anti-corporate message, presumably because Cline felt that was needed as part of the cyberpunk-y vibe he was going for, but it falls on its face even conceptually when it is so indulgent in the consumerist nostalgia that's so prevalent in media currently in the real world. I personally think it's perfectly fine for a book to be fun fluff in general, don't get me wrong, but I still feel like the irony is worth mentioning.
If you like to get references and you miss the nerd culture of the 80s, maybe you will like this book. A lot of people do and I would guess there's a reason for it. If you want to emulate the experience of this book without actually reading it, then I recommend reading Reddit posts by lonely "nice guys" and switching to a tab to read an entire Wikipedia article about an 80s video game every so often. I'd say that'd be rather more fun.
