Ready, Player One by Ernest Cline REVIEW

Gamers, Geeks, and Nerds alike, come one and come all.

From the epic adventure that led Frodo and Sam to the depths of Mordor to when the Empire was casted out of the sky in a blaze of glory and From the yellow glutton power man, bursting through a maze of dots and killer ghosts to the 8-bit war waged on by insects in Galaga. We have found our saving grace, ladies and gentlemen. We have joined forces with the Knights of the Round Table and have NI'd our way to the Holy Grail of geek-ism with the help of the one true King of Briton, Ernest Cline.

I have spent the past few days, besides wishing that this book never end, thinking about a way to describe this book. I have come to the conclusion that it cannot be explained, but detailed in the glory that it was written in. So before I lose my mind, geeking out over the robot fight scene and the Monty Python quest, Let me get the gist of the story out in the open:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a tale set in a dystopian like world where almost all of civilization lives primarily on what they call the internet, the OASIS. The OASIS is a Virtual Reality (VR) interface where you interact with the rest of the world via a VR console and perpetually exist in digital form. You can build your own avatar, much like you do when you log in to an Xbox account or a World of Warcraft account, except you can control this avatar and do pretty much everything you do in real life. With the entire world carelessly living their existence through a virtual reality, most of the physical world went straight to shit. Homes were no longer homes, but trailers stacked up on top of each other to make what would become a building of sorts, Stacks, to correctly phrase it, and as the physical world in its majority crumbled to a wasteland, the VR world took over entirely. You could work as your avatar, attend classes as your avatar, you can order food with your avatar, you can upgrade your arsenal of weapons and increase your status by fighting other avatars, like you would in any video game. You could even design your own world, spaceship, home, universe, anything; endless possibilities. Prior to my reading, I thought this wouldn’t be such a bad idea, but then I started to realize that there are far more disadvantages to this lifestyle.

So what exactly happens in the book? Well when the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, passes away, a will is found stating that there is a hidden Easter egg inside his system and that if the three keys and three gates are found and won, the winner would inherit Halliday's entire wealth and estate, the OASIS. With the entire world already living out their lives in the OASIS, a swarm of avatars set out in search for the hidden keys and gates that would lead them to a life time supply of fame, fortune, and Super User access to the OASIS. Basically, if you win, your avatar is unstoppable, filthy rich, and you can do what you want with the OASIS and by that I mean you control the OASIS.

But with that kind of power at stake, it was too good to be just some rat race for the masses.

A major competitor in this hunt was a company lead by CEO, Nolan Sorrento. Innovative Online Industries (IOI) is bent on obtaining the full Super User rights to the system for mass production and complete control of the internet. As the largest company in the world, already owning almost all the local hotspots and ISP's, and the mass hysteria of the general public, setting their sights on the golden treasure, one gunter sets his radar on the adventure of a life time. Gunter, by the way, is the name given to any avatar / person that has dedicated their time to studying everything James Halliday related in searching for the Easter egg. This includes a complete Almanac on the 1970's and 1980's.

For the rest of the story, we follow Aech (H) - the best friend, Daito and Shoto - the tag team from Japan, Art3mis - a vlogger and skilled Gunter, Nolan - the corrupt CEO of IOI, and the one and only Wade Watts - aka Parzival, who is the first person, who after five long years has watched the world fail at the hunt, to discover the existence of the first key and start a virtual shit storm.

TL;DR : Game creator dies and leaves behind millions. Everyone searches for his secret and a sketchy AT&T / Comcast like company wants to take over the internet with the prize. Wade, a nobody kid, finds the first key and the VR world flips its shit.

My thoughts:  One of a kind. This book rocked my socks off! What an incredible adventure from start to end. I found myself flipping seamlessly from one chapter to the next; no time to stop and take a bathroom break. It wasn’t just the gaming references or the intelligently placed Easter egg tests the players had to face, it was Ernest's imagination that made this novel stand out. To take gaming and turn its history and culture into an actual reality and then bring about the most iconic movements of the 1980's (in technology, film, and music) together, was a well-blended smoothie with a full serving of fruits and veggies.

I even found myself googling most of the games they played and the references they mentioned just to see what exactly it was he was talking about. And because of it, I felt immersed by Ernest's flow, the unlikely band of amigos, and execution of such a vivid walkthrough of a virtual world; so precise. Am I being too nice? Maybe. But this novel now holds a place in my bookshelf along with the other novels that have opened my heart and touched my soul. You took me on the most incredible adventure I have gone on in a long time.

5 out of 5 stars because Thank you.

Ernest Cline is also the author of Armada, his second novel. Ready, Player One will have a movie adaptation by the year 2018. Both novels are available at Barnes and Nobel and the Amazon Kindle library.