Ready Player One is So Close to Perfection
What could have been a defining dystopia is just a dead pop-culture wasteland
Ready Player One was written by Ernest Cline and was released in August 2011 to a world completely unprepared for the ideas it presented — themes of virtual reality, online culture, and the impact it would have on society that previously hadn’t been explored in such a broad and yet pointed way.
It was extremely unique for its time — the other major young adult dystopias released at the time being variations of the same brutal totalitarianism of The Hunger Games, which was still fresh and novel at the time.
It goes in the completely opposite direction (brutal anarcho-capitalism) and does so well. So why are the reviews on it completely mixed — what could be the downfall of what, at first glance, seems to be an exciting read?
Here, I want to dissect this book made by the terminally geeky Ernest Cline, and see what makes the good and bad of this book tick.
1 — These Ideas are Amazing!
Ready Player One follows a trainwreck of a protagonist (though critique of him will come later) named Wade Watts, who is best described as a living, breathing, Wikipedia article.
He lives within his aunt’s trailer in Oklahoma City — within the novel calls “The Stacks” and this is the first idea within the book which genuinely is captivating.
The Stacks as described in the book are a series of stacked up trailers and RVs held together by some sort of ultra-strong yet light and cheap scaffolding, allowing for the stacks to be tentatively held together.
The only issue is that these stacks are ridiculously unstable and are shown multiple times in the book to be susceptible to tilting, bending, and literally falling apart at the seams. Needless to say, the Stacks are not the best place to live, and most only live in them, because of their extremely low rent.
The Stacks are the best setting I can think of for Ready Player One because it perfectly complements the second major setting: The OASIS — a VRMMO which most of the world’s population now uses to shield themselves from the despair and dread that now envelops the whole world due to a failing climate, droughts, wars, and unbelievably high crime.
Of course, the OASIS shields most of this from the denizens in it, and I think it’s an incredible synergy.
The Stacks are dinky and stilted, with little potential for any growth, but the OASIS is large and bright, with a massive public school system and near-infinite library, allowing for massive potential for growth in someone willing to use these tools to their fullest extent.
This escapism/reality blend is a somewhat obvious metaphor for what is happening today — except this book was written over a decade ago, when the runaway escapism of Western society wasn’t nearly as discussed as today.
Had I not known this book was written by Ernest Cline, I would think that this insight into the nature of society was deeply profound and came from a wise man. However, there are still some more good ideas which show up in the book:
- The 80s references, while mostly a negative aspect and a dead weight attached to what would otherwise be a fantastic book, aren’t entirely devoid of Accidental Insight. For example, in one specific passage, Wade talks about how the system agent AI which helps him manage his accounts and maintain security on his devices is Max, a perfect recreation of Max Headroom — a fictional AI who was played by an actor wearing prosthetics to make himself look like a computer-generated image, now an actual AI and completely computer-generated.
THIS IDEA IS BRILLIANT!
The idea of the whole of society within the future, with vastly superior technology, deciding that the best thing to do with it was to recreate in totality the 80s, a decade defined by the primitive growing pains of the technology within it is — again — supremely intelligent social commentary, that, had I not been aware of some of the author of this book’s other works, I would assume was the product of divine insight — though unfortunately, this never goes anywhere besides the simple idea that Ernest wanted his book to be about all his favorite stuff. - The Sixers are an obvious nod to the idea of the extreme anarcho-capitalism which runaway corporatism inevitably leads to, but there’s more to them than the book makes apparent.
For one, the book mentions how Innovative Online Industries, the creator of the Sixers, supports the US government financially with its debts, which is a really interesting bit of speculation, and I think adds quite a bit to the worldbuilding of the book — since the possibility of the entertainment industry supporting large world governments is quite bleak.
Also, I really like the corporate arrest done on Wade Watts, since this adds again to the idea that governments really have gone down the drain.
Unfortunately for the book, however, that’s about where all the ideas worthy of praise come to an end — since, as you may recall, this book contains both good and bad segments
And unfortunately, there are quite a lot of bad segments.
2 — This Writing is Absolutely Hopeless
The book, while at its best is a sublimely good critique of all things social, especially as relating to geekiness and politics, is not all good — at its worst, this book actively feels like it’s trying to push some sort of extremist, sexist, terminally online movement on the reader.
Nowhere is this more clear when it comes to the character of Wade Owen Watts.
In Ready Player One, Wade is portrayed as a 17-year-old mega-geek who is extremely clingy whenever the subject of women comes into the discussion, and who worships James Halliday, another anti-social nerd who made the OASIS and the Easter egg hunt the two are participating in.
This is the main reason that the book is so obsessed with the 80s, as this egg hunt created by the eccentric billionaire happens to be centered around the 80s, and every single pop culture book, movie, and song within it.
Now, this isn’t necessarily bad. It could end up working out still as a brilliant commentary on how people and society as a whole are cruel, soulless, piranhas who will do anything to get wealth and, more importantly, fame; as well as the previously mentioned faux nostalgia introduced by the idea of MAX.
However, Ernest doesn’t take the idea any further than his love for the 80s defining the entire culture of the book. That’s it. Not only this, but he seems to actively make the story entirely about his personality, one way or another. For example, Wade Watts.
Even Wade’s name is based on pop culture! The book tells you that Wade’s name is based on alliterative superhero identities such as Clark Kent!
While I would normally say that that isn’t too much of an issue, it becomes abundantly clear later on that his name being entirely from pop culture is only a forewarning of this character.
I think the best way to illustrate how this is a forewarning is with a few excerpts from the book:
After that night in the Distracted Globe, Art3mis had cut off all contact with me. She blocked all of my e-mails, phone calls, and chat requests. She also stopped making posts to her blog. I tried everything I could think of to reach her. I sent her avatar flowers. I made multiple trips to her avatar’s stronghold, an armored palace on Benatar, the small moon she owned. I dropped mix tapes and notes on her palace from the air, like lovesick bombs. Once, in a supreme act of desperation, I stood outside her palace gates for two solid hours, with a boom box over my head, blasting “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel at full volume. She didn’t come out. I don’t even know if she was home.
As you can see, Wade is a dislikable protagonist from the start, even though the book tries very hard to attempt to write off some of his actions. In fact, Wade’s knowledge of the circumstances around him and how to manipulate them to get his desired results are nothing short of 4th-wall-breaking. At one point within his quest to get the egg, he plays a guitar solo — unprompted, with no reason as to do so — only to discover that the specific song he played in the specific location was what was needed to progress through Halliday’s Easter egg quest.
Not only this, but his knowledge of 80s culture is also nothing short of miraculous, and as I said before, he comes off as reciting a Wikipedia page from memory whenever he attempts to reference something — almost all the characters in the book do, but Wade more than most. I think it’s best demonstrated with another excerpt from the book:
Over the past five years, I’d worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. I read every novel by every single one of Halliday’s favorite authors.
And I didn’t stop there. I also watched every single film he referenced in the Almanac. If it was one of Halliday’s favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds, I rewatched it until I knew every scene by heart.
I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as “The Holy Trilogies”: Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.)
I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith. I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue. Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. You could say I covered all the bases.
This demonstrates perfectly what I think prevented this book from becoming a great piece of literature, not unlike what he references in the book — the constant, unending references to other works are primarily what makes his books have high praise in the first place!
The book could stand on its own, and be better off in fact, if only these types of passages weren’t written into the book as a way for Ernest to both appeal/pander to other nerds like him, and allow him to make the production of the book easier on himself — since the OASIS would normally demand the imagining, or at least hinting at, of a completely new pop culture and societal ecosystem.
Writing the book’s characters to be as obsessed with the 80s as himself made it easier on Ernest, and in doing so, he condemned the book to rot away when I believe it could have stood alongside what he referenced — as an example of great literature.
