Literally Geeky discussion

Something to say about the winner of our July anniversary poll? This is the place to do it.

I'm really looking forward to this one. It's been on my 'to read' list for a while. I was prepared to rig the votes if it didn't get picked. Did I type that out loud?

I've bought Ready Player One already, and I reckon I might actually finish with some time to spare this month!

Really looking forward to reading this one, I've heard amazing things about it... but then, I heard amazing things about Redshirts, so we'll see.

I really enjoyed this book. I picked it up and read it in two days.

Think I might have to sit on the grumpy step, because as you'll see from my review, I wasn't as enamoured of this book as all that...

I'm 20% of the way through this, but I am in love. I am so glad I found this group and had a reason to finally pick up this book. Wooo!

We're glad you found us, Sarah!

Looking forward to the hangout this coming Monday. I think it may be the best one yet.

So here's my full review...
I wanted to like this book, really I did. I could not be more in the target audience if I tried - only 2 years older than Ernest Cline, the 1980s he grew up in and so obviously celebrates in "Ready Player One" was my 1980s (albeit from a UK perspective) - the Atari 2600, AD&D, Star Trek, dingy game arcades, Star Wars, MMORPGs, lots and LOTS of Monty Python... the list goes on. Hell, from this description alone, I'd so be playing in the OASIS:
"The Firefly universe was anchored in a sector adjacent to the Star Wars galaxy, with a detailed recreation of the Star Trek universe in the sector adjacent to that."
But whilst I found it enjoyable (my favourite geek in-joke being Wil Wheaton and Cory Doctorow getting consistently re-elected as president and VP of the OASIS User Council), I couldn't really warm to the book. To some extent, the problem might have been my over affiliation with the geek worlds Cline uses to describe his world of 2044 - perhaps (younger?) readers less familiar with not so obscure to me AD&D modules might find what is being described as compelling and interesting, but for me it all seemed a little obvious. And perhaps even a little lazy too - it's all well and good dealing with perfect recreations of classic films and so on, but to say stuff like "their shape and color always reminded me of Doctor Who's TARDIS" (without developing things a little further), whilst designed to show how 80s both Wade and his fellow OASIS denizens are, seems like the most lackadaisical application of a simile to me.

In terms of the writing overall, I was also never entirely convinced by Wade's voice, especially when such phrases as "her entries were filled with self-deprecating humor and witty, sardonic asides" are put into his mouth as examples of his standard, everyday speech. Similarly, Wade's supposed position as a top "gunter" and Halliday scholar is often sacrificed for the expediencies of plot - not getting the whole Zork/Frobozz thing seems like an odd lapse, over and above the fact it drives the story forward, and only serves to chip away at the convincing characterisation of the book's protagonist. Having said that, maybe the problem is that having come up with his extremely ingenious premise, Cline finds it insanely difficult to consistently come up with plausible riddles (God knows I would) - so for example, (view spoiler)[whilst Art3mis's linking of the last clue to Shakespeare is presented as being hugely revelatory to the other characters, surely the first thing any of them would have done would be to cut and paste the phrase into 2044's equivalent of Google and find out where it came from...? (hide spoiler)]

I know my next criticism might seem odd for a book mainly set in a wholly created virtual world, but I was troubled by Cline's description of the "Real World" of 2044. Whilst entirely plausible in general, and redolent of William Gibson and his take on how the intersection of technology and society could conceivably pan out, this book doesn't share his ability to create a world that feels realistic all the way down. Although Wade is a product of the Stacks, the book would have held together better if it had, like Gibson does, shown how tech use (or lack of it) differs at different levels of social spectrum - I found it hard to believe that either culturally or economically the very poorest people on the Earth (by which I mean your African subsistence farmer kind of poor) were all logged into the OASIS. Of course, Wade is an unreliable narrator at times, but rather than feeling like his mitigated POV, this lack of reality in the real world being described in the book seems to be a (wholly understandable) reflection of the author's necessarily Western viewpoint. Not so much a problem when we are in the OASIS, but given a major character arc involves (view spoiler)[Wade's movement towards living in the physical world, (hide spoiler)] the undercooked nature of the real world of "Ready Player One" is jarring.

My final bone of contention is IOI - as the bad guys of the piece, they are too obviously THE BAD GUYS, their motivation for taking over OASIS being purely monetary. OK, that is the underlying raison d'être for most corporations, but no bad guys in history have ever stated that they are the bad guys - even the Nazis had what seemed to be perfectly acceptable justifications for their policies amongst those ordinary people who supported them. "IOI believed that Halliday never properly monetized his creation, and they wanted to remedy that" - how many companies do you know of have a marketing strategy that says in bald terms "we only want to make money out of you - suck it up!", and how long do you think they'd stay in business if they did? If we are to believe this world Cline has created, for me I would have liked to have seen things from the other side of the propaganda curtain, as it were, because otherwise IOI seem to have as much depth as a moustachio-twirling villain of a Victorian melodrama (something which is only reinforced by the straightforward drone-ness of their avatars).

All of the above might make it sound that I didn't like this book, but I did - it's just that I didn't like it as much as all that. Cline's geek credentials are impeccable (although I'd argue the toss as to whether or not Car Wars was actually a role playing game, GURPS Autoduel notwithstanding) and his vast amount of film, game and book references provides a great deal of pleasure for the geek reader in spotting them all (my favourites being the Brazil-themed aliases Wade uses at one point). But to some extent I feel that this would work better as a film (aside from the fact that the IP/licensing issues for such a project would be insane), since a good actor would be able to imbue Wade with a little more depth and reality than Cline has been able to.