Book Review: Ready Player One

Back in the late Seventies and early Eighties, during my slothful youth, I spent an inordinate amount of time and quarters playing video games. Asteroids, Tempest, Missile Command, Night Driver and Pacman, to name a few, to a background soundtrack of Eighties prog-rock bands like Kansas, Styx, Genesis and Rush. Oh, the good old days.

Now screenwriter, spoken-word artist and all-around tech geek Ernest Cline takes readers on a virtual romp through that bygone era in his debut novel, Ready Player One.

Set in a bleak, overpopulated near-future America, where housing space is so limited that citizens pile mobile homes into twenty-unit high "stacks", the story follows lonely teenager Wade Watts' classic hero's journey through a globe-spanning virtual world called OASIS, where most of humanity spends every waking hour to escape their grim reality.

After millions of fellow "gunters", competitors in the game, spend fruitless years combing OASIS for clues, Wade deciphers the first puzzle, igniting a cut-throat battle between the gunters and the evil IOI corporation to find the three keys, solve the game challenges and win the biggest prize in video game history.

Along the way, we're treated to lots of Eighties nostalgia, especially if you were an introverted game-playing nerd like me. As a patriotic Canadian, I was particularly tickled to find one of the game challenges dedicated to the music and imagery of the iconic Canadian band Rush.

Even if you're too young to remember the Eighties, or aren't much of a videogamer, you'll still appreciate the sheer delight Cline takes in leading us along the chase, with a few twists and turns along the way.

Thanks to Ethan Hein for the awesome photo