"Ready Player One" (Mark Frauenfelder/Boing Boing).

If you’ve ever sat through an “I Love the 80’s” MTV marathon, spent significant time playing Pac-Man, or recognize the line, “Bueller?  Bueller?” I think I’ve got a book you might like to read. 

"Ready Player One", written by screenwriter and first-time novelist Ernest Cline, is, strictly speaking, of the science-fiction gamer genre (if there is such a thing).  Set in 2044, it tells the story of Wade Watts, a young man who spends his days plugged into an online virtual paradise called the OASIS, hiding from the degraded, crumbling world outside.

Created by the Willy Wonka of video game designers, business tycoon James Halliday, the OASIS houses humans’ immortal avatar counterparts.  Wade, taller, thinner, and better-looking as his avatar Parzival, can be anything he wants to be in this world.  

 Halliday’s death prompts a great revelation: Halliday has staged a “golden ticket” contest throughout the thousands of OASIS planets. The first avatar to solve a set of riddles, all relating to 80s pop culture and ye olden days of video games, and unlock a series of gates becomes heir to his vast fortune.   

After years of casting about for answers, but making no progress in the contest, Wade unexpectedly unlocks the first gate and is caught up in instant fame--and danger at the hands of those who desire his knowledge.

Cline, himself an 80s nostalgist, weaves references of the time’s popular taste in and out of the main story line: Monty Python films, video games from the first Atari classics to World of Warcraft, Rubik’s cubes, DeLoreans, and orange carpet.  And, at the risk of writing up an 80s fun fact medley, he does so fairly well.  For readers who exhibit Aqua Net-induced brain damage, are really trying to forget those Hammer pants, or who are simply too young, Cline supplies just enough background detail to make the reader feel like they know what he’s talking about--“The Black Tiger computer game?  Of course, that old favorite!”--without sinking the story in obscure “inside baseball” language.

Readers of the Internet age are primed for new online worlds, and the creation of an imaginary OASIS is an exciting prospect, in the book and outside of it.  Cline likes the idea of a 3D virtual world.

“Basically,” he says in an interview with sci-fi and entertainment website io9.com, “what would be the coolest possible version of the internet in 35 years?  You’re inside of it, manipulating physical objects.  It’s sort of an extension of the Wii and Kinect.  As for why it’s free and anonymous, I think that makes it a way to completely escape in real life.  It’s the best possible version of cyberspace.”

"Ready Player One" carries a main plot that takes place in cyberspace and multiple worlds therein, affording plenty of opportunity for Cline to compose densely described scenes and vividly imaged environments, along with the requisite character emotion and drama.  Yet, like a game world, the story feels somewhat one-dimensional, transparent.  I was left with the impression that I had not fully experienced the worlds and events Cline depicted, as if he did not finish shaking the Polaroid photo before he went and framed it.  

Climactic battles come and go within a couple pages; murders occur, to not much consequence to the story or the main characters; the real world, on its last legs after centuries of exploitation, is barely a subplot.  This could be taken one of two ways: either the story’s thinness is a deliberate metaphorical representation of a video game, a world that no matter how dynamic or pixelated, can never be tangibly real, or the story simply did not get fleshed out.  

Nonetheless, "Ready Player One" is a fun read (and it will make a good movie. Warner Bros. has already picked up the film rights).  

“It seems like we’re living in a nerd golden age,” Cline says, and, in a world in which we carry the world with us in a smartphone everywhere we go, and eulogies to Steve Jobs are still being produced, its hard to disagree.  Some may still say, I’m not a gamer, or sci-fi’s really not my thing.  But fear not. "Ready Player One" lets you take familiar 80s kitsch with you as venture into new and pretty cool virtual territory.

Reach Leslie here.