At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, Ready Player One is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut – part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.
It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of 10,000 planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune – and remarkable power – to whoever can unlock them.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved – that of the late 20th century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.
Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt – among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life – and love – in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.
A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?
Be advised: this is YA fiction. Still good, though. I had heard about this book and was expecting grown-up-style cyberpunk. It is not that. This novel is YA; strictly PG-13. Which is fine, by the way; however, if you want Neuromancer for the 21st century, then look elsewhere.Â
Positive Outlook I had thought this book would be a total rip off of Sword Art Online. There are similar themes. However, this book does take the concept in a different direction. I like the humanizing aspects of the character portrayals. Pretty much everyone was multi dimensional and had a backstory. This was sort of a psychological thriller. I enjoyed the character interactions and the main character was someone you could root for. I do think I should mention that this is kind of PG-13. There are some scenes…
Such fun that I read it four times This book was such a delightful surprise. A colleague mentioned it in passing, so I borrowed it from the local digital library. From the very first page — nay, from the very first paragraph — I was hooked. This is a book I quite literally could not put down.Â