Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (4 stars)

Holy 80s batman!

You know when you get a bunch of nerds together and you run out of things to talk about and then someone mentions an old video game or computer they saw recently, or a mame console they just built, and it triggers a rush of "the first computer game I ever played...", and "my first computer was a...", in a game of one-upmanship for who loves the machine the most, and who began the love affair the earliest? Well, here's an entire book of that. If just reading this post makes you want to talk about old computer games, you'll probably love the book.

I'm a nerd and born within a decade of Ernie Cline, so I was perfectly poised to enjoy this mega-buffet of computer game and geek nostalgia from the 80s. That's where I was, a few paragraphs in, rolling around in glorious appeals to nostalgia. But by the time I'd read the very detailed and thorough explanation of the easter egg and Halliday's quest, I was mad. Despite being immensely appealing to children of the 70s and 80s the book is written for 13 year-olds.

If only Cline could STOP EXPLAINING EVERYTHING IN GREAT BORING DETAIL. Seriously. You don't need to spell out every aspect of the quest at the start of the book, you are treating your readers like dribbling idiots. The book should have started with Wade climbing out of his trailer and going to his secret OASIS-enabled lair. Everything else you could figure out from context, in fact, doing the figuring-out is one of the best parts of reading.

So the beginning is just a bit weak, but the rest is OK right? No. Cline goes around hitting everything with the explanation hammer. What's the point of geek references if you explain them all? They should be fewer and subtle so that regular readers aren't bothered by them, but people in the know get a kick out of them. Instead the story flow is often destroyed with mini Wikipedia-like entries. This reference was already pretty lame but the explanation makes it worse:

I memorized lyrics. Silly lyrics, by bands with names like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Pink Floyd. I kept at it. I burned the midnight oil. Did you know that Midnight Oil was an Australian band, with a 1987 hit titled "Beds Are Burning"?

At one point Cline (via Wade) goes on a bizarre rant about all the things he wishes he'd been told in (I assume) some sort of hard-knocks atheist parenting school where every kid gets a lump of coal carved with a likeness of Charles Darwin for Christmas:

Here's the deal Wade. You're something called a 'human being'. That's a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet we're descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you'll learn more about it later. But trust me, that's really how we all got here. There's proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Oh, and by the way...there's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.

Of course the whole thing is very meta: a novel about an easter egg and a videogame quest that itself contains an easter egg and a videogame quest, with a real-world DeLorean as a prize that Wade drives in the novel...

But enough complaining, and time to own up: I actually really liked it. There were plenty of annoyances, but I was still up at all hours reading to see how the quest for the next gate would play out. Any novel that grabs your attention like that is pretty special, so I'm giving it a high score despite all the flaws.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite geek culture references. I felt like high-fiving someone when Wade speaks his OASIS pass-phrase to log in, which was:

You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

I was also happy about my second-favourite piece from the Star Wars score (behind the Cantina) getting a place as the victory music for completing the first challenge:

I recognized the music. It was the last track from John Williams' original Star Wars score, used in the scene where Princess Leia gives Luke and Han their medals (and Chewbacca, as you may recall, get the shaft).

4 stars.