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Ready Player One Kindle Edition
At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut--part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.
It's the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune--and remarkable power--to whoever can unlock them.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday's riddles are based in the pop culture he loved--that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday's icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes's oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.
Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt--among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life--and love--in the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.
A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?
- Bloomberg, Best Books of 2016
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateAugust 16, 2011
- File size5725 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011: Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of other world-wide citizens, Wade dreams of finding three keys left behind by James Halliday, the now-deceased creator of OASIS and the richest man to have ever lived. The keys are rumored to be hidden inside OASIS, and whoever finds them will inherit Halliday’s fortune. But Halliday has not made it easy. And there are real dangers in this virtual world. Stuffed to the gills with action, puzzles, nerdy romance, and 80s nostalgia, this high energy cyber-quest will make geeks everywhere feel like they were separated at birth from author Ernest Cline.--Chris Schluep
Guest Reviewer: Daniel H. Wilson on Ready Player One by Earnest ClineDaniel H. Wilson is the New York Times best-selling author of Robopocalypse.
I dare you not to fall in love with Ready Player One. And I mean head over heels in love--the way you fall for someone who is smart, feisty, and who can effortlessly finish your favorite movie lines, music lyrics, or literature quotes before they come out of your mouth.
Ready Player One expertly mines a copious vein of 1980s pop culture, catapulting the reader on a light-speed adventure in an advanced but backward-looking future.
The story is set in a near-term future in which the new, new form of the Internet is a realistic virtual multi-verse called the OASIS. Most human interaction takes place via goggles and gloves in millions of unique worlds, including the boring (and free) “public education” world from which our teenage protagonist must escape.
Our unlikely hero is an overweight trailer park kid who goes by Wade Watts in real life, and “Parzival” to his best friends and mortal enemies--all of whom he interacts with virtually. Just like the Arthurian knight that is his namesake, young Wade is on a quest for an incredible treasure guarded by mythical creatures. Specifically, the creator of the OASIS and richest man on the planet, James Halliday, stipulated in his will that his fortune be given to the first person who can find an “Easter egg” hidden somewhere in the OASIS. The catch? Every devilishly complex clue on this treasure hunt is rooted in an intimate knowledge of 1980s pop culture.
This leaves the people of the future hilariously obsessed with every aspect of the 1980s. The setup is particularly brilliant, because Ernie Cline seems to have a laser-beam knowledge of (and warm, fuzzy love for) every pop song, arcade game, and giant robot produced in the last thirty years. Seriously, this is a guy who owns and regularly drives a 1982 DeLorean that has been mocked up to look exactly like the time-traveling car in Back to the Future, complete with a glowing flux capacitor.
But Ready Player One isn’t just a fanboy’s wet dream. Real villains are lurking, threatening our hero with death in their ruthless hunt for the treasure. Worse, these corporate baddies are posers with no love for the game – they have movie dialogue piped in via radio earpieces, use bots to cheat at arcade games like JOUST, and don’t hesitate to terrorize or murder people in the real world to achieve their aims inside the OASIS.
As the book climaxes, a mega-battle unfolds with sobering life-or-death stakes, yet soldiered entirely by exciting and downright fun pop-culture icons. The bad guys are piloting a ferocious Mechagodzilla. Our good guy has to leave his X-Wing fighter aboard his private flotilla so that he can pilot an authentic Ultraman recreation. And how do you not grin when someone dons a pair of virtual Chuck Taylor All Stars that bestow the power of flight?
Cline is fearless and he lets his imagination soar, yet this pop scenery could easily come off as so much fluff. Instead, Cline keeps the stakes high throughout, and the epic treasure hunt structure (complete with an evolving high-score list) keeps the action intense. The plot unfolds with constant acceleration, never slowing down or sagging in the middle, to create a thrilling ride with a fulfilling ending.
Best of all, the book captures the aura of the manifold worlds it depicts. If Ready Player One were a living room, it would be wood-panelled. If it were shoes, it would be high-tops. And if it were a song, well, it would have to be Eye of the Tiger.
I really, really loved it.
-- Daniel H. Wilson
Questions for Ernest Cline, Author of Ready Player One
Q) So it seems you’re a bit of a pop-culture buff. In your debut novel Ready Player One you incorporate literally hundreds of pop culture references, many of them in ways that are integral to the book’s plot. What’s the first thing you remember geeking out over?
A) Sesame Street and the Muppets. I thought Jim Henson ruled the universe. I even thought it was pretty cool that I shared my first name with a muppet. Until the first day of kindergarten, when I quickly learned that "Ernie" was not a cool name to have. That was about the time I segued into my next childhood obsession, Star Wars.
Q) Like the book’s hero, you possess a horrifyingly deep knowledge of a terrifyingly broad swathe of culture, ranging from John Hughes movies to super-obscure Japanese animation to 8-bit videogames to science-fiction and fantasy literature to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. What the heck is wrong with you?! How do you have so much time on your hands?
A) Well, I’m raising a toddler now, so I don’t have as much time to geek out as I used to. I think I amassed a lot of that knowledge during my youth. Like most geeks, I was a sponge for all kinds of movies, TV shows, cartoons, and video games. Then as an adult, I worked at a long series of low paying tech support jobs that allowed me to surf the Internet all day, and I spent a lot of my cubicle time looking up obscure pop culture minutiae from my childhood while I waited for people to reboot their PCs. Of course, I spent most of my off hours geeking out, too. Luckily, all those hours can now be classified as "research" for my novel.
Q) You’re stranded on an island and you can only take one movie with you. What is it?
A) Easy! The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. (Can I take all of the DVD Extras and Making of Documentaries, too?)
Q) You’re given free tickets and back stage passes to one concert (artist can be living or dead)- who is it and why?
A) Are we talking about time travel back to a specific concert in the past here? Because it would be pretty cool to stand on the roof of Apple Records and watch the Beatles jam up there. But my favorite rock band that’s still together is RUSH, and I just bought tickets to see them this June!
Q) Favorite book of all time.
A) That’s an impossible question! I could maybe give you three favorites: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
Q) Best failed TV show pilot available on Youtube?
A) The unaired Batgirl pilot starring Yvonne Craig.
Q) Favorite episode of Cowboy Bebop?
A) “Ganymede Elegy.” Or maybe “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui.”
Q) What’s the first arcade game you ever played? What’s your favorite?
A) I was deflowered by Space Invaders. My all time favorite coin-op game was probably Black Tiger.
Q) Your idea of the perfect day...
A) Play Black Tiger. Then go see Big Trouble in Little China at the Alamo Drafthouse with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter doing a live Q&A afterwards. When I get home that night, I accidentally invent a cheap abundant clean energy source that saves human civilization. I celebrate by staying up late to watch old Ultraman episodes with my daughter (who loves Ultraman even more than I do).
Q) True or False. We hear you own a DeLorean and that you plan on tricking it out to be a time-travelling, Ghostbusting, Knight-Rider car.
A) False. I actually plan on tricking it out to be a time-traveling Ghostbusting Knight Riding Jet Car. It’s going to have both a Flux Capacitor and an Oscillation Overthruster in it, so that my Delorean can travel through time AND solid matter. My personalized plates are ECTO88, just like a DeLorean that appears in my book.
(I’m so glad that you asked this question, because now I can justify buying the car as a "promotional tool" for my book. Everyone reading this is a witness! My DeLorean is helping me promote my book! The fact that I’ve wanted one since I was ten years old is totally irrelevant!)
Q) Speaking of DeLoreans: biggest plot hole in the Back to The Future Films?
A) The Back to The Future Trilogy is perfect and contains no plot holes! Except for the plot hole inherent in nearly all time travel films: The planet Earth is moving through space at an immense speed at all times. So if you travel back in time, you are traveling to a time when the Earth was in a different location, and you and your time machine would appear somewhere out in deep space. For a time machine to be useful, it also needs to be able to teleport you to wherever the Earth was/is at your destination time.
Q) But there are two DeLoreans in 1885--why doesn’t Doc dig out the one he buried in a cave for Marty to find in 1955 and use the gasoline from it to get the other DeLorean up to 88mph?
A) Doc would have drained the gas tank before he stored a car for 80 years, so there wouldn’t have been any gas. And tampering with the DeLorean in the cave at all could conceivably create a universe-ending paradox, because it has to be in the cave for Marty to get back to 1885 in the first place. Totally not a plot hole!
Review
“The science-fiction writer John Scalzi has aptly referred to Ready Player One as a ‘nerdgasm’ [and] there can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture. . . . But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A fun, funny and fabulously entertaining first novel . . . This novel's large dose of 1980s trivia is a delight . . . [but] even readers who need Google to identify Commodore 64 or Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, will enjoy this memorabilian feast.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Incredibly entertaining . . . Drawing on everything from Back to the Future to Roald Dahl to Neal Stephenson's groundbreaking Snow Crash, Cline has made Ready Player One a geek fantasia, '80s culture memoir and commentary on the future of online behavior all at once.”—Austin American-Statesman
“Ready Player One is the ultimate lottery ticket.”—New York Daily News
“This non-gamer loved every page of Ready Player One.”—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series
“A treasure for anyone already nostalgic for the late twentieth century. . . But it’s also a great read for anyone who likes a good book.”—Wired
“Gorgeously geeky, superbly entertaining, this really is a spectacularly successful debut.”—Daily Mail (UK)
“A gunshot of fun with a wicked sense of timing and a cast of characters that you're pumping your fist in the air with whenever they succeed. I haven't been this much on the edge of my seat for an ending in years.”—Chicago Reader
"A 'frakking' good read [featuring] incredible creative detail . . . I grinned at the sheer audacity of Cline's imagination.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Fascinating and imaginative . . . It’s non-stop action when gamers must navigate clever puzzles and outwit determined enemies in a virtual world in order to save a real one. Readers are in for a wild ride.”—Terry Brooks, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Shannara series
“I was blown away by this book. . . . A book of ideas, a potboiler, a game-within-a-novel, a serious science-fiction epic, a comic pop culture mash-up–call this novel what you will, but Ready Player One will defy every label you try to put on it. Here, finally, is this generation’s Neuromancer.”—Will Lavender, New York Times bestselling author of Dominance
“I really, really loved Ready Player One. . . . Cline expertly mines a copious vein of 1980s pop culture, catapulting the reader on a light-speed adventure in an advanced but backward-looking future.”—Daniel H. Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse
“A nerdgasm . . . imagine Dungeons and Dragons and an 80s video arcade made hot, sweet love, and their child was raised in Azeroth.”—John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of Old Man’s War
“Completely fricking awesome . . . This book pleased every geeky bone in my geeky body. I felt like it was written just for me.”—Patrick Rothfuss, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Wise Man’s Fear
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence.
Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by brushing up on a few coin-op classics. Galaga, Defender, Asteroids. These games were outdated digital dinosaurs that had become museum pieces long before I was born. But I was a gunter, so I didn’t think of them as quaint low-res antiques. To me, they were hallowed artifacts. Pillars of the pantheon. When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence.
I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer’s tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer. I wasn’t welcome in my aunt’s room across the hall, which was fine by me. I preferred to crash in the laundry room anyway. It was warm, it afforded me a limited amount of privacy, and the wireless reception wasn’t too bad. And, as an added bonus, the room smelled like liquid detergent and fabric softener. The rest of the trailer reeked of cat piss and abject poverty.
Most of the time I slept in my hideout. But the temperature had dropped below zero the past few nights, and as much as I hated staying at my aunt’s place, it still beat freezing to death.
A total of fifteen people lived in my aunt’s trailer. She slept in the smallest of its three bedrooms. The Depperts lived in the bedroom adjacent to her, and the Millers occupied the large master bedroom at the end of the hall. There were six of them, and they paid the largest share of the rent. Our trailer wasn’t as crowded as some of the other units in the stacks. It was a double-wide. Plenty of room for everybody.
I pulled out my laptop and powered it on. It was a bulky, heavy beast, almost ten years old. I’d found it in a Dumpster behind the abandoned strip mall across the highway. I’d been able to coax it back to life by replacing its system memory and reloading the stone-age operating system. The processor was slower than a sloth by current standards, but it was fine for my needs. The laptop served as my portable research library, video arcade, and home theater system. Its hard drive was filled with old books, movies, TV show episodes, song files, and nearly every videogame made in the twentieth century.
I booted up my emulator and selected Robotron: 2084, one of my all-time favorite games. I’d always loved its frenetic pace and brutal simplicity. Robotron was all about instinct and reflexes. Playing old videogames never failed to clear my mind and set me at ease. If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game’s two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It’s just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.
I spent a few hours blasting through wave after wave of Brains, Spheroids, Quarks, and Hulks in my unending battle to Save the Last Human Family! But eventually my fingers started to cramp up and I began to lose my rhythm. When that happened at this level, things deteriorated quickly. I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: game over.
I shut down the emulator and began to browse through my video files. Over the past five years, I’d downloaded every single movie, TV show, and cartoon mentioned in Anorak’s Almanac. I still hadn’t watched all of them yet, of course. That would probably take decades.
I selected an episode of Family Ties, an ’80s sitcom about a middle-class family living in central Ohio. I’d downloaded the show because it had been one of Halliday’s favorites, and I figured there was a chance that some clue related to the Hunt might be hidden in one of the episodes. I’d become addicted to the show immediately, and had now watched all 180 episodes, multiple times. I never seemed to get tired of them.
Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).
My own home life had never even remotely resembled the one depicted in Family Ties, which was probably why I loved the show so much. I was the only child of two teenagers, both refugees who’d met in the stacks where I’d grown up. I don’t remember my father. When I was just a few months old, he was shot dead while looting a grocery store during a power blackout. The only thing I really knew about him was that he loved comic books. I’d found several old flash drives in a box of his things, containing complete runs of The Amazing Spider-Man, The X-Men, and Green Lantern. My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Wade Watts, because he thought it sounded like the secret identity of a superhero. Like Peter Parker or Clark Kent. Knowing that made me think he was must have been a cool guy, despite how he’d died.
My mother, Loretta, had raised me on her own. We’d lived in a small RV in another part of the stacks. She had two full-time OASIS jobs, one as a telemarketer, the other as an escort in an online brothel. She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn’t hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones. But the earplugs didn’t work very well, so I would watch old movies instead, with the volume turned way up.
I was introduced to the OASIS at an early age, because my mother used it as a virtual babysitter. As soon as I was old enough to wear a visor and a pair of haptic gloves, my mom helped me create my first OASIS avatar. Then she stuck me in a corner and went back to work, leaving me to explore an entirely new world, very different from the one I’d known up until then.
From that moment on, I was more or less raised by the OASIS’s interactive educational programs, which any kid could access for free. I spent a big chunk of my childhood hanging out in a virtual-reality simulation of Sesame Street, singing songs with friendly Muppets and playing interactive games that taught me how to walk, talk, add, subtract, read, write, and share. Once I’d mastered those skills, it didn’t take me long to discover that the OASIS was also the world’s biggest public library, where even a penniless kid like me had access to every book ever written, every song ever recorded, and every movie, television show, videogame, and piece of artwork ever created. The collected knowledge, art, and amusements of all human civilization were there, waiting for me. But gaining access to all of that information turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. Because that was when I found out the truth.
...
I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.
The worst thing about being a kid was that no one told me the truth about my situation. In fact, they did the exact opposite. And, of course, I believed them, because I was just a kid and I didn’t know any better. I mean, Christ, my brain hadn’t even grown to full size yet, so how could I be expected to know when the adults were bullshitting me?
So I swallowed all of the dark ages nonsense they fed me. Some time passed. I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything since the moment I emerged from my mother’s womb.
This was an alarming revelation.
It gave me trust issues later in life.
I started to figure out the ugly truth as soon as I began to explore the free OASIS libraries. The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest. Artists and scientists and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they’d left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as “the human condition.”
It was not good news.
I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said:
“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 to 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.
“You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right?
“But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now.
“Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.
“Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’
“You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.
“What happens when you die? Well, we’re not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You’re just dead, your brain stops working, and then you’re not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called ‘heaven’ where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There’s no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you’re going to die someday and disappear forever.
“Sorry.”
...
OK, on second thought, maybe honesty isn’t the best policy after all. Maybe it isn’t a good idea to tell a newly arrived human being that he’s been born into a world of chaos, pain, and poverty just in time to watch everything fall to pieces. I discovered all of that gradually over several years, and it still made me feel like jumping off a bridge.
Luckily, I had access to the OASIS, which was like having an escape hatch into a better reality. The OASIS kept me sane. It was my playground and my preschool, a magical place where anything was possible.
The OASIS is the setting of all my happiest childhood memories. When my mom didn’t have to work, we would log in at the same time and play games or go on interactive storybook adventures together. She used to have to force me to log out every night, because I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked.
I never blamed my mom for the way things were. She was a victim of fate and cruel circumstance, like everyone else. Her generation had it the hardest. She’d been born into a world of plenty, then had to watch it all slowly vanish. More than anything, I remember feeling sorry for her. She was depressed all the time, and taking drugs seemed to be the only thing she truly enjoyed. Of course, they were what eventually killed her. When I was eleven years old, she shot a bad batch of something into her arm and died on our ratty fold-out sofa bed while listening to music on an old mp3 player I’d repaired and given to her the previous Christmas.
Product details
- ASIN : B004J4WKUQ
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; 1st edition (August 16, 2011)
- Publication date : August 16, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 5725 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 386 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,961 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
ERNEST CLINE is an internationally best-selling novelist, screenwriter, father, and full-time geek. He is the author of the novels Ready Player One and Armada and co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. His books have been published in over fifty countries and have spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games.
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Ready Player One was a thrilling adventure filled with science fiction, geeky references, and a creative outlook on the future. This book takes place in 2045. Most of the world’s resources have run out and there is an energy crisis that has driven many people out of a job. How do people deal with living in such a terrible world? The OASIS provides an escape for millions of people. It’s an online multiplayer game that allows millions of people to connect and explore. The creator of this OASIS became a multi billionaire named James Halliday. After he died, he created a contest for everyone in the OASIS to solve a bunch of clues using facts about his life. The winner would inherit all of his money and become the CEO of Gregarious Simulation Systems. Because this was such a good prize, millions of people studied Halliday and everything he did. Among these people was Wade Watts, an 18-year-old senior in high school. In order to obtain the Easter egg, you had to find the copper key and then find the first gate. After that, find the jade key and then the second gate. And lastly, find the crystal key and the third gate. Five years pass and no one can decipher the copper key riddle. Until one day in school, Wade figures it out. He becomes famous for being the first one to get his name onto the score board. However, he runs into his cyber crush, Art3mis. They hit it off and exchange contact information. She shortly completes the gate after him. Wade immediately finds the first gate and moves on while Nolan Sorrento, president of IOI blows up his home. More happens and eventually Wade is forced to work with Art3mis, his best friend Aech, and Shoto in order to open the third gate. He has thousands of people from the OASIS help him unleash a full-on attack on the Sixers (another name for the people at IOI). After all the effort, Wade wins the contest and finally gets to meet Art3mis in person.
Many characters change toward the end of the book. Art3mis neglects Wade to focus on the hunt regrets it because she enjoyed her time with Wade. James Halliday spent his entire life escaping his miserable life through video games. Before he dies, he tells Wade not to make the same mistake as him. However, Wade changed a lot throughout the entire book. He starts off as a regular teenage boy, just playing video games every waking second of his day, desperate to find the egg. He isolates himself completely from other people until he meets Art3mis. He starts focusing more of his time and energy on her rather than on the hunt. Before her, speaking to girls was out of the question. Also, his goals with what he would do with the money changed. At first, he just wanted to build a spaceship and fly far away from earth. But after meeting Art3mis, he wanted to help feed the hungry like she did. He became very selfless and even risked spending the rest of his life as an IOI indentured servant just to make sure people wouldn’t have to deal with IOI taking over the OASIS. At the very end, the author wanted to show the readers just how important it is to be in the real world. “It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS.” (pg 372) Staying logged onto the OASIS has removed so many people from reality and hurt their mental health. Sometimes, escaping in the real world, no matter how bad it is, is the right thing to do.
I thoroughly enjoyed every part of the book. While there were a lot of boring long descriptions, they were necessary. I loved how the characters changed a lot throughout the book and enhanced the theme. Teaching kids to not ignore the problems in the world and not just escape onto their phones is crucial. Ernest Cline was showing us what would happen if we simply did nothing and I hope this was a wakeup call for everyone. I liked the dialog and how the characters connected. I feel like Cline really captured the true essence of a friendship. Wade was also a good character. Some his lines and sayings were funny, and this made him a likeable protagonist. Some of the plot points were good as well. I would’ve never thought to have Wade become an indentured servant to penetrate IOI from the inside. That was really creative. I also enjoyed all of the references in the book, even though I didn’t understand most of them. And the way he incorporated them in the riddles was just absolutely brilliant. This is my second time reading the book and I enjoyed it so much. I’m sure all the nerds out there (especially ones who were teens in the 80’s) really appreciated this work of art
Pros:
When the book evokes memories of things long forgotten and expounds on them in a way you probably haven't though about for years, you do feel a satisfying sense of understanding. In many books, for myself at least, a description of an item may be ambiguous enough for me to not quite know whether the image I have in my head is accurate, but by relying on mostly things that exist, you KNOW when your mental image is spot on.
Our main character has a lot of knowledge pertaining to his quest before the book even begins, but I bought his expertise. This may be a stumbling block for some, but it's clear that our protagonist (and author perhaps?) has spent almost a lifetime amassing knowledge required to complete his task, and while it does lead to some hand holding on his part for us, the audience, I never felt like it was TOO far of a jump.
Cline does weave in a lot of his own fictional history alongside actual 80's pop culture in a believable manner. The trail of breadcrumbs that marks the main quest throughout the story is littered with games, books, and movies both real and factual, and the line is blurred well enough that many times I wasn't exactly sure if something mentioned actually existed, or was created solely for the story. This neatly leads into a plausible extrapolation of the future of technology and video games.
Following the thread of the main riddle is entertaining and highly driving. The actual clues aren't really intended to be "solved" by the reader, rather than followed. Our protagonist is the brains of the operation here, not us. It's a fun ride along, sort of like watching a magic trick be performed. You don't have to figure out the inner workings prematurely to enjoy the show.
The largely virtual setting of the story does allow for some fairly imaginative combinations of people and places, reminiscent of playing with a toy box full of dolls and action figures from all sorts of shows, cartoons etc. sort of mashed together in a sort of wish fulfilling way, not too much unlike seeing the many different Lego sets being used together in "The Lego Movie"
Cons:
While the references I got were satisfying, there were some parts where familiarity was implied and I felt a bit "out of the loop", particularly when referencing music from that era. the description might be "x song by y artist was playing", but with no other description of the song, I didn't know whether it was happy, sad, suspenseful, intense etc. It definitely isn't a show stopper by any means, and the context of the scenarios do help inform the tone, but sometimes requisite knowledge seemed just that--a prerequisite to understanding what was happening.
Wade, our protagonist, seems to flip flop between self loathing, overly confident, childish, meticulous, immature, mastermind whenever necessary for the plot to progress. He doesn't seem so much like a dynamic character as much as possessing a convenient set of switches to flip when appropriate. Maybe a different style of writing would better suite bridging or informing these changes, but as it stands he almost seems like many different people controlling one body at different times
Side characters are flat as pancakes. The permanent character list in this novel is already pretty small, but even the characters we have besides our protagonist are very one note. [MILD SPOILERS]]While some characters aren't exactly as they seem, even those differences when revealed turn out to be mostly superficial. [END SPOILERS] There are even Japanese characters that read completely like what a typical american would think a Japanese person is like, complete with adding "-san" to the ends of names and talking about honor.
My last con is pretty plot specific so it might bare no relevance until you actually read the book so [MILD SPOILERS] Wade goes through a drastically life altering change that should have been the fire for the rest of his quest, but it seemed like little more than a plot device to cleanly allow him to be unchained from realistic consequences of his situation. It almost seemed like a quick and sloppy way to get rid of baggage as opposed to a full blown emotional catharsis. In fact, after it happens, it's mentioned maybe twice throughout the remainder of the book [END SPOILERS]
All in all, the book does have heart, even if it is buried in an old trunk of 80's memories. There is an Earnest (no pun intended) core that you can feel throughout, and that emotional attachment and love for the source material really does frame the story. As I said before, if the era and source material seem interesting to you, then you will definitely get something out of this. If you're skeptical, the first few chapters will definitely help you decide whether it's for you or not, so previewing an excerpt is probably a good idea. If you don't really care for the material, then this book isn't going to change your mind.
Top reviews from other countries
It follows the story of Wade Watts, a teenage orphan living in a crowded future-world where the only escape is the virtual universe of the OASIS. When the creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves a challenge to find an Easter egg hidden within the virtual world. When Wade finds the egg, he must battle a powerful corporation to prevent them from taking over the OASIS and destroying it.
Overall, Ready Player One is a great read for fans of science fiction and virtual reality. It is a captivating adventure that will keep readers hooked from beginning to end. Highly recommended!
Thank you
Na verdade, tenho duas críticas para o livro. A primeira é que tem referências demais mesmo. Acho que o autor estava tentando fazer homenagem a tanta coisa, que passou um pouco do limite. Mas talvez esse número de informações não teria sido tão esmagador se não viesse com tantas explicações sempre, o que é minha segundo crítica. Infelizmente, dá para ver desde o começo do livro que o autor usa muito de explicações na sua narração. E não é só na hora de dizer de que ano e para qual função etc o jogo que ele mencionou é, mas em muitas das ações mesmo. Todas as melhores partes do livro são as mais presenciais e que têm um tom mais de prosa do que de uma história repassada por terceiros.
Por causa disso, o ritmo do livro cai um pouco em algumas partes, o que eu consegui superar e impedir de me desanimar, já que li rápido e só parava quando estava no meio de uma parte emocionante. Essa é uma mania minha, de sempre parar de ler só quando algo importante está acontecendo e estou realmente animada para continuar, que aí fica bem difícil desanimar. Quem tiver menos tempo para ler e for obrigado a ler de pouco em pouco vai sentir mais essa quebra no ritmo e esse excesso de informações. Só tenho uma coisa a dizer a quem desanimar: continue, porque o final é ótimo!
Aliás, o livro é dividido em três partes e a terceira é de longe a melhor. Simplesmente amei o clímax, amei a resolução e admiro muito o autor por ter conseguido criar um final que fosse aumentando mesmo o nível, como em jogos de videogame, sem parecer forçado ou exagerado. O enredo da história e seu desenvolvimento, aliás, são impecáveis, o que definitivamente vai me fazer dar uma chance para outros livros do autor. Sem contar com o apego que criei pelos personagens, que não é das coisas mais frequentes para mim.
Estou extremamente feliz de ter decidido ler este livro, que me surpreendeu completamente e foi divertido do começo ao fim. Apesar das minhas críticas, me apaixonei completamente pela história e pelos personagens e senti desde antes da página cem que ele entraria na minha lista de favoritos. E é por isso que dei nota cinco. Os pequenos defeitos não importam quando a história é tão incrível e bem desenvolvida quanto a desse livro. Ele conseguiu fazer com que eu, uma pessoa que só jogou uns cinco jogos de videogame e um RPG na vida, mergulhasse completamente na história e me divertisse como se tivesse crescido nos anos oitenta. Simplesmente amei.