Reading Ready Player One: A Few Thoughts

When Ernest Cline's Ready Player One first came out (2011) I was pretty much burned out on science fiction. (This was about the time when I put together the first edition of After the New Wave, thinking of it as an act of closure, which it really proved to be for a while.)

And even before I decided to take a break from it I was paying little attention to the young adult-oriented work that was getting so much press then, because my glances at it gave me the impression (accurate, I think) that it did not offer those things that most attracted me to science fiction--conceptual originality and audacity, elaborate world-building, political teeth. And as Cline's book got rather less media attention than, for example, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games saga (or even Veronica Roth's Divergent), it was easy for me to forget about it until the movie came out and got people talking about it again.

Yet, looking back it seems to me that Ready Player One is a quintessential piece of early twenty-first century fiction, because of the way it draws together so many of the prevailing tendencies of the period so far.

There is post-cyberpunk--by which I mean that what we have come to think of as cyberpunk tropes (extremes of wealth and poverty in a decaying society, super-corporations, exploding information technology) were presented without the ostentatiously avant garde narration and prose style once associated with the original, '80s-era cyberpunk fiction, making for a more straightforward and accessible (and for most of us, more appealing) narrative.

However, reflecting that it was 2011 and not 2003 or 1997, this particular post-cyberpunk work's bleakness is informed by the experience of the 2006-2008 energy crisis, the Great Recession, the element of apocalypse and dystopia so fashionable in those years; while similarly fashionable the protagonist is a young adult.

And of course, there is the sense of nostalgia, the density of pop cultural reference, that had so come to suffuse popular culture in general and science fiction in particular by that point, with in both cases an emphasis on the things of childhood in the '80s, and especially the geekier things of childhood, like video games.

There is even a nostalgic element in the centrality of virtual reality in Cline's world that those with short memories may find it difficult to appreciate today. In the '90s, after all, we were all promised that immersive virtual reality, and indeed immersive virtual reality as our primary manner of engagement with the Internet, was just around the corner, but then it wasn't, and when Cline wrote his book it still wasn't, instead looking like a flying car of the digital age, one of many. (Only years after, circa 2014, did VR seem to get its second wind, and even with the number of VR users in the U.S. expected to approach 40 million this year, it remains far from certain that the technology has truly arrived.)

Reading the book I found that where the pop cultural invocations had only a faint charge for me, or none at all, Cline's enthusiasm comes through, and it can be infectious. Cline's book, however, impressed me as more than just a reflection of the pop cultural and science fiction zeitgeist of the time. Some aspects of his future are fairly well thought-out, especially but not solely its VR technology. (Just what will happen to hotels in a world where no one travels, for example?) The book also impressed me with its sense of humor, containing as it did some laugh out loud funny bits. And after the mid-point I had to force myself to put it down when I needed to, something I haven't been able to say about a work of fiction in far too long.