Ready Player One is about to release in theatres, and so now seemed like a good time to read the origin material. In addition, Audible offered a trial access with a single free book credit. As such, I chose this much-lauded title.
It is fairly well known that Ready Player One is absolutely crammed with references to sci-fi and fantasy material from the 1980s. The main character of the story is a major player in a search for actual hidden treasure in a virtual world. Despite the setting taking place in the mid 2050s, the man that built the virtual world and hid his treasure within it designed the clues around their favourite things, which mostly involve the 1980s. By my best estimate, I am the exact target market for this material.
To summarize my experience with this book, have you ever read the Bible? I mean, really read the Bible, cover to cover? Numbers? Deuteronomy? Those chapters that are nothing but expansive endless dumps of information are exactly what this book is like. Sometimes the information is world-related, but often it is simply a blunt, pointless reference to something from a former decade. At one point, the author literally just listed a bunch of famous sci-fi and fantasy authors. “Yes, those are people,” I said to myself. It felt as though the author cared nothing for the story, except as an excuse to cram together as many references to their favourite things as possible. Interestingly, I am not opposed to this tactic. As I said, I am the target market for this book; everything in it is something that I hold near and dear to my heart. However, the execution is sorely lacking.
The Tomb of Horrors is a classic (and notorious) Dungeons and Dragons module. It is both lethal and unfair. I have read and run the entire module on multiple occasions, laughing as players fell victim to the sphere of annihilation, and offering sympathetic words when the unfair terms of the gold and silver sceptre excised a player from the fun. When I read that this module featured in Ready Player One, I was, in a word, ecstatic. However, that excitement quickly vanished as the scene played out. For those of you that have read the book, no, I’m not talking about the changes explicitly called out in the book. I’m talking about the unmentioned or inaccurate details, of which there were many. My disappointment at this failure led me to conclude: if you are going to cater to nerds, and you are going to use existing material to do that, you had better get it right! I cannot imagine a more pedantic and picky group of people than gamer nerds like myself.
In the interest of avoiding a rant, I have no desire to compile a list of the reasons that inspired me to abandon the book. Overall, the entire experience felt bland and dated; the words used to describe the electronic underworld were particularly antiquated in the context of the modern internet. I honestly cannot remember anyone using the terms “leet” or “warez”, without an air of sarcasm, anywhere outside of a five year window in the late 90s. More than anything, what I desperately wanted was for at least one character to bemoan the need to be constantly immersed in mediocre products of the past in their desperate search to escape poverty.
However, despite my criticisms, I am still very excited to see this story transferred to film. The vast majority of my complaints are likely to be rendered moot by a theatrical presentation in which exposition simply vanishes.
As an audiobook, I felt that Wil Wheaton did an excellent job of trooping through the barrens of exposition, and with breathing life into otherwise flat dialogue between one-dimensional characters.
