"Ready Player One"

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is one of the most engaging books I've read in some time. I have always been a borderline sci-fi fan, thoroughly enjoying the Ender series by Orson Scott Card and the mega-hit Dune by Frank Herbert, but I've never delved much deeper than these bestsellers. Steve, however, is a huge sci-fi fan and when he managed to polish this one off in only 2 days (maybe a personal best), I knew I had to check it out. The cover of the hardback edition alone is exciting, described by my friend and fellow blogger Patrick as something "straight from an 80's video game." (Okay, that was pretty loosely quoted-I don't remember exactly what he said, but it was definitely something like that.) 

Which, of course, is exactly what it's meant to look like. The premise of Ready Player One is fairly simple: the world is in a sort of pre-Apocalyptic, post-major disaster/energy crisis that makes reality fairly unpleasant. The solution? An awesome virtual reality world that allows a participant to be entirely immersed in the (made up) world around them, from sight to smell to touch. And the best part about this world, known as the OASIS, is that it's completely free for all users, which is why it is so widely used by the mostly homeless, slightly starving population of Earth. The world of the OASIS is based around 1980s pop culture, which takes the reader back in time to the days of Pac-Man and Blade Runner. Awesome. 

Okay, that's the simple part. It gets ever-so slightly complicated once you get over the fact that the majority of the human species is running around making wild hand gestures and talking to themselves for most of their lives, believing that somehow this virtual world is more important than their own crappy reality. The co-creator of the OASIS and the world's richest man, James Halliday, has died and revealed to the world that he has hidden an Easter Egg inside the OASIS. Whoever finds three hidden keys and three hidden gates first will discover the Easter Egg--and become the sole heir/heiress to Halliday's ridiculous fortune. Most of the world becomes obsessed with the search, but many fall out of the running pretty quickly. Only those who dedicate their lives to the search, people known as gunters (for some reason I can't remember), are still looking for the Egg five years later, when the readers are introduced into the plot. 

Wade Watts (known as Parzival in the OASIS) is a full-time gunter and 18-year-old high school senior who has spent the past 5 years searching for the Egg. He knows more about the 80s than probably anyone who lived during that time period. He considers himself a pretty average person, both in reality and in the OASIS, until he does what no one else in history has...he finds the first key. Suddenly, Wade is the most famous person in the world, heralded by gunters who were losing hope and hunted by those who will do anything to find the Egg. Wade must solve the rest of Halliday's puzzles before time runs out and he is dead...either in the game or in the real world. Once the action begins the story races by until the reader can scarcely believe that they've reached the end. 

Ready Player One is by far one of the best sci-fi books I have ever read, and maybe one of the top 30 books I've ever read. And the best part? It's being made into a movie...

Overall Grade: A