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Book review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Absolutely delightful. A trip down a memory lane for anybody who remembers the 80s geek culture, or has fondness for it. It's 2040s and 1980s just made a come back in a big way because one of the richest men in the world, James Halliday, designer of video games and specifically the fully-immersive virtual reality that is being used by everybody in the world, just died and left his fortune to the person who can win specially designed quest. The catch is that Halliday, ubergeek grown up in the 80s, thinks everybody should love the same movies, games and music as he did so that's what he based his quest on. Basically he is looking for a soul mate in the most screwed up way possible, postmortem. The rest is adventure, romance and geekiness galore in the best tradition of the 80s favorites. Author glossed over the technical solution for the incredibly powerful virtual reality world and sketchily describes what is essentially a dystopian future but on the other hand there is very little of moralizing or philosophizing which is common for similar settings (take Williams's Otherland, for instance), so it's all just great fun.
And there really was no chance for me to not like a book that contained Highlander references and quotes!
On a related note, the book made me seek out my favorite Atari title, Montezuma's Revenge, aka Monti, the one I spent hours upon hours on and also a ton of pocket money because, of course, there wasn't a personal computer in my 80s childhood so I had to go to one of the recently opened video game parlors. There is an emulator for it which actually works in my Windows VM! I was way better at it 20+ years ago :)
And there really was no chance for me to not like a book that contained Highlander references and quotes!
On a related note, the book made me seek out my favorite Atari title, Montezuma's Revenge, aka Monti, the one I spent hours upon hours on and also a ton of pocket money because, of course, there wasn't a personal computer in my 80s childhood so I had to go to one of the recently opened video game parlors. There is an emulator for it which actually works in my Windows VM! I was way better at it 20+ years ago :)
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(To my own amazement, I consider Lukyanenko's "лабиринт отражений" to be a much better written book).
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Lukyanenko was fun too, as was Stephenson's Snow Crash, better than Lukyanenko, in fact. Then again, Stephenson's game related portions of Reamde were much better written but the book overall was boring. BTW, have you read Suarez's Daemon/Freedom? That was an almost perfect combination of great writing and fantastic plot, in my opinion.
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P.S. A couple of entertaining points about Player One: when Art3mis tells Wade she might be a 63 old lady, it is most probably a reference to one of the early cyberpunk novels (can't remember the name) where the protagonist discovers just that: that his virtual girlfriend is an old lady. Another: near the end of the novel, Wade and Aech are flying in a jet - at "10 thousand feet": there was no explanation of why the cruising altitude of the jets has fallen by 20 thousand feet from the present, so I consider it to be a rather embarrassing gaffe on part of the author.
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I've been wondering if Cline had strewn little eggs of his own throughout the text, like in jokes for the geekiest readers.
My advice is read Anathem, skip Reamde.
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