Ready Player One is geek crack, a novel that reads like a cross between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Tron, with a healthy dose of Avatar, The Matrix, The Last Starfighter and The Hunger Games thrown in for good measure.
It combines sci-fi, romance, action and drama, while referencing all manner of 1980s pop culture brilliance, from Ghostbusters and The Goonies to Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons of Daggorath. The Ladyhawke soundtrack plays a big part in the narrative and Pac-Man makes his presence felt throughout, while Wil Wheaton reads the real-world audio book, and it doesn’t get any geekier than that.
Story-wise, it’s a futuristic spin on the kind of quest adventure that authors have been chronicling for centuries. Proceedings are set in 2044, when The Great Recession has brought the planet to its knees. To escape the misery, the majority of humans spend their every waking hour in the OASIS, a massive multiplayer online simulation where the sky, and pretty much anything beyond, is the limit.
The OASIS was created by Gregarious Simulation Systems chiefs James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, but when Halliday mysteriously dies, he throws the OASIS into chaos with the video and book he leaves behind.
They explain - Willy Wonka-style - that whoever manages to collect three keys and pass through three gates hidden within the OASIS will receive his fortune and a controlling stake in GSS.
The bulk of the novel takes place five years after this announcement, and follows the efforts of Wade Watts to hunt down the keys and win the contest. A lonely Oklahoman teen, Wade goes by the name of Parzival in the OASIS, and he’s a likeable central character with a quick wit and a passion for all things ‘80s, from Galaga to Rush to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
His journey spans the length and breadth of the OASIS, taking the reader on a magical mystery tour to distant planets that are influenced by everything from Blade Runner to Back to the Future. Along the way he finds friendship, love, and the ultimate enemy in the shape of Innovative Online Industries, a powerful corporation who will stop at nothing to win the contest and turn the OASIS into a purely commercial destination.
It’s hugely derivative stuff - a grab bag of pop culture citations and allusions - but there’s a charm to the way in which Ready Player One wears its influences on its sleeve, and part of the fun is trying to pick out the multitude of references peppered throughout.
Indeed, so detailed is the 1980s knowledge that one wonders if author Ernest Cline has a time machine (housed in a DeLorean) facilitating his fact collecting and checking.
Yet as well as being geek central for overgrown children of a certain age, the book is also quite simply a gripping adventure that unfolds at a breathless pace and builds to a grandstanding conclusion.
So whether you know your Voight-Kampff from your Kobayashi Maru or not, Ready Player One is quite simply a must-read, an epic adventure crafted from the ground up for nostalgia junkies who love the movies, games and music of the 1980s, and those who simply like a rip-roaring story.
Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK and although he was born in the 1970s, he considers himself a child of the '80s. Chris can be found going on and on about Back to the Future on both Twitter and MyIGN.
Source : http://www.ign.com
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