Ready Player One

Ernest Cline
2011

Picture the scene: It's 2044 and the world is nearing total destruction. Resources are scarce, while recessions and overpopulation mean that very few people have money and many live in "stacks" (literally stacks of caravans piled on top of each other). The outlook is very bleak indeed. There is only one thing that takes people away from this scene.

OASIS is the huge online multiplayer game where most of Ready Player One is set. It is a virtual reality world in which users can choose their own avatars to look and sound how they want, while they can travel to thousands of different worlds; users can travel in a flying Delorean to the Star Wars galaxy, or to play Quidditch in another. OASIS is the place where people escape their dying world and create their own.

This is how life is lived until the creator of OASIS, James Halliday dies, leaving his vast fortune in his will to whoever can find it. The catch is, he has hidden it within OASIS - and he's hidden it well. The novel follows the protagonist Parzival (real-world name: Wade Watts)'s attempt to find the treasure, along with thousands of others.

The novel is fantastically addictive. The quest for the "Easter Egg" is as much the readers' as it is Parzival's. Within a few chapters, I found myself falling easily into the language of the book (words such as "gunters" became so familiar, it's almost disappointing that they aren't real). With each chapter, I needed Parzival to solve each puzzle put before him. His encounters with fellow OASIS users, in particularly Art3mis, make him a particularly likeable protagonist, while Cline's liberal referencing of 1980s popular culture create a fun, inclusive atmosphere.

Everything about this novel is geeky. However, it is so geeky, it's cool. Massively cool. Ready Player One is ridiculously readable and witty and throws it's readers into a whole new world without them taking notice. It feels as though, while reading the novel, we are in OASIS, playing as Pazival.

Ready Player One is a hugely impressive debut novel, and many writers will wish that they had written it. With a film version of the book supposedly scheduled for release in 2014, I get the feeling Ernest Cline and his work are set to become very big indeed.