Ready Player One (2011) Book Review

 Hey everyone! I'm back for my review of the 2011 novel, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. There will be spoilers for the book in this review, so if you haven't read it yet and are interested in reading it, please do so before you read my review. Let's get into it.

Ready Player One is a unique book. It was Ernest Cline's first novel and it was published in 2011, a year before The Avengers (2012) and Arrow (2012-2020) came out, spawning genre movies and TV shows and propelling geek culture into popularity. Cline is a screenwriter who wrote the story for Fanboys (2009) and then co-wrote the script with Adam F. Goldberg, creator of The Goldbergs (2013-Present) and it's spin-off, Schooled (2019-2020), and a full-time geek (his biography blurb on the back of this book's paperback calls him that). Having been born in 1972, Cline has seen geekdom evolve over the years.

The book is definitely a first novel. I mean Cline doesn't develop his supporting cast very well, and they're actually off-screen for a good chunk of the book, which is frustrating because Wade Owen Watts, a.k.a. Parzival, is not that interesting of a character. And while it predicts the direction our world is going in, as all good Science Fiction tends to do, it doesn't develop the world of 2044/2045/2046 all that well, beyond that virtual reality was more prominent by then and a game developer died, after setting up a hunt where the winner takes ownership of the OASIS, which is the virtual world of the internet in this book. And everything revolves around the hunt, and gaming, and online life. And I realize that's funny for me to say, given we've been mostly limited to online communications for most of the last two and a half years because of the pandemic, but it doesn't make for a very compelling book.

What does make it a compelling book is this tale of friendship that Cline created in the background between Wade/Parzival, Helen/Aech, Toshiro/Daito, Akihide/Shoto, and Samantha/Art3mis. Why is this important? Well, back in 2011 people weren't as used to interacting with other people and developing friendships and romantic relationships online, like we do today. Well, the general public weren't. We geeks have been doing it via message boards, chat rooms, e-mail, and MSN Messenger, and then later YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, since the internet became more prominent in the '90s. So this book shows that whether you meet friends or a romantic partner online or in person doesn't matter, what matters is how you feel about one another. Even when you're in competition with one another in a game.

I honestly like Aech alot more than I like Wade. Mainly because she's someone I would absolutely get along with if I met someone like her in real life. Art3mis is fine, but, because the focus character is Parzival, we don't get much with her until almost the end of the book. Because Cline wasn't great at writing characters for a novel. I get putting the story in first person limited, but that just REALLY limits character development for the supporting cast. Cline did fix that in Armada, his second book, which was published in 2015, thank goodness, but still, as a screenwriter, he should've understood how to develop characters beyond the point of view lead character. Then again by 2010 when he began writing the book, he had only written one screenplay and that was Fanboys, which he co-wrote the final version of with Adam F. Goldberg. 

I realize I sound negative in this review, but these are the biggest problems with Ready Player One, the novel. Cline actually fixes some of those problems in the screenplay for the 2018 movie adaptation. I love this book, despite those problems. After all it was Cline's first novel and writing a novel is different from writing a movie screenplay. It's just no piece of entertainment media is perfect and flawless, because we as human beings aren't perfect and flawless.

The geeky references in this book are fine. But, being someone who was born in 1986 and grew up in the '90s and 2000s, there are alot of '80s references in this book I didn't know what they were since I grew up with different shows, movies, comics, books, and music than Cline did. I mean yeah, I watched movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars Trilogy, the Star Trek movies, and films like E.T. and Flight of the Navigator, but I didn't see movies like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off until I was in my early 30s in the late 2010s. I didn't grow up with them. I also didn't grow up with any of the video games from before Super Mario Bros. came out for the Famicom and the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. So there was definitely alot more references that I've never heard of or watched/read/played/listened to.

Overall, despite my problems with this book, Ready Player One is still a pretty good read. I recommend it more if you were a geek growing up in the '80s, but people my age and younger can still appreciate it too. Like I said, it kind of predicted how we deal with online interactions in the age of Covid and the book came out in 2011, nine years before the pandemic hit. 

Alright my friends, I think that's gonna be it for me for tonight. I'll be back tomorrow for my review of the movie adaptation of Ready Player One. So until then have a great night and I will talk to you all later. Take care.