Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

ISBN: 978-0-307-88743-6

Listen, I get that Wade Watts is a teenager. I get that Ready Player One was released in 2011 and likely written far before then. But come on, it’s freakin’ 2045 — the casual misogyny, fetishization of “geek girls”, and caricaturist representation of Japanese culture detracts from your story, Cline. It doesn’t make it more immersive; in fact, it’s incredibly distracting, and it almost made me stop reading entirely. The only reason I picked it back up is out of boredom.

I’m also relatively unsure who the target audience is for Ready Player One. It reads like a young adult novel, but Cline over-explains technology a young adult in 2011 would already be familiar with and under-explains niche references that same person wouldn’t recognize. It feels like it’s trying to simultaneously play off existing 80s nostalgia in Gen X and ignite it in the younger set. I think it’d be better if Ready Player One targeted one generation or the other — as it is, it’s not starting any conversations between them.

With that said: I did enjoy the story. The descriptions of the early 2020s were, at times, scarily accurate. Without question, I can imagine an alternate future where the Metaverse actually took off, and it’s easy to see how that could be more appealing than the climate and energy catastrophes that our actual society is actually hurtling towards.

Also… who doesn’t wanna cheer for a team of scrappy misfits trying to beat out a multi-trillion dollar mega-corporation!