Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, the 2012 Prometheus Award winner (in a tie, with Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze) is about to become much better known. A movie version, directed by Steven Spielberg, will be released March 30.
Not everyone has climbed on Ernest Cline’s bandwagon. “Second Opinion: Ready Player One is the Worst Thing Nerd Culture Ever Produced,” published last year and written by I. Coleman, tries its best to live up to the title. Sample paragraph:
“Ready Player One is a 2011 novel that lifts its setting, premise, and most of its story beats from 1992’s Snow Crash, removes all of the self-awareness, badass action, and philosophical musings on the nature of the relationship between language and technology, replaces them with painfully awkward 80s references, and changes the main character from a samurai pizza deliveryman and freelance hacker to the asshole kid in your friend group who claimed he ‘didn’t need showers,’ vomited onto the page by Ernest Cline. Its bestseller success and Cline’s subsequent 7-figure sale of the screenplay to Steven Spielberg is as close as we can get to objective proof that the meritocracy isn’t working.”
I’ve noticed other folks on social media who are scornful of the book. Disclosure: I enjoyed reading it..
I wasn’t the only one. Reviewing the book for the Boing Boing website, Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder wrote,
“It seems like every decade or so a science fiction novel comes along that sends a lightning bolt through my nervous system: Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). And I recently discovered what my mind-blowing novel for the 2010s is: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.”
Just in case you couldn’t tell if he liked it, Frauenfelder later adds, that the book is “a rollicking, surprise-laden, potboiling, thrilling adventure story that takes place both in the OASIS and the real world. It is loaded with geek-culture references from the 1980s that resonated strongly with me — but they are all integral to the story and never feel gratuitous. You don’t need to know about 1980s pop culture to appreciate the story. I loved every sentence of this book, and was a little sad when I reached the end and re-entered reality.”
— Tom Jackson
I thought it was at best a mediocre piece of work. And I thought it particularly unsuited to receive a libertarian award, because the whole story was about the protagonist’s quest for the unearned, in an extraordinarily large amount, which made me want to channel Ayn Rand. I certainly don’t plan to see the movie.
I haven’t tried to re-read it.
When I read “The Da Vinci Code,” I knew the details were absurd, but I was swept along by the story. Could something similar have happened with “Ready Player One,” or is Mark Frauenfelder correct that it’s indeed a good book?
I liked and enjoyed Ready Player One the first time I read it, not so much when I re-read it a few months ago.