Nerds That Geek Book Review: 'Ready Player One'

Written by Scott Murray

​Ready Player One is an extremely fun and entertaining book. If you enjoy sci-fi and have paid any attention to it or its surrounding culture, or to nerdery or geekdom in general, or have found yourself wanting to learn more about them, you should absolutely give Ready Player One a read. It’s fantastic, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
 
I preface my writing with this statement because the more I find myself breaking the book down the more I find unsettling uncertainties. Despite these, I enjoyed reading the book immensely and would gladly recommend it to almost anybody. In fact, I read through it in less than two days in an effort to finish before the film’s release, and despite my breakneck pace it never once felt like a chore that I had to return to in order to satisfy some looming deadline. It was actually quite the opposite: I found myself tempted to pick it up even when I was doing other things. This is why it feels awfully strange to sit down and write this: most of the quantifiable things I have to say are tinged with disappointment or unease, but, like a visit to Disneyland, even when I saw the employee in the costume, I had fun anyway. It would be easy to read this and feel that I walked away from Ready Player One feeling disgruntled, but that simply isn’t true. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, but I’m afraid my following words will seem to indicate the opposite, despite my best efforts, simply because the good I feel is difficult to put into words, while the niggling concerns I have are easily identifiable.
 
Let me start the meat of my examination by putting some fears to rest: if you think you won’t understand the many terms or technologies jam-packed into this book, worry not: Cline gives deft, accurate, and easily-digestible explanations about almost everything he mentions. For the things I was not familiar with the explanations were clear, easy to understand, and helped bring me into the fold without making me feel overwhelmed with information or like I was being given a shortened or watered-down experience. The explanations of things I am already intimately familiar with were nice refreshers, concise enough that they never once felt like a chore to read and served to highlight which parts of my experiences or knowledge would be pertinent. Even if you know nothing about technology or any of the themes of the book, you should be able to follow along with no hesitation or confusion.
 
And oh boy, if you’re looking for references, you’ll find them in spades. Some are overt and obvious, dancing in front of your face like the giant advertisements that litter the skyline in Blade Runner, while some are more subtle, secreted away in a few syllables of casual, off-hand sentences. They run the spectrum: there are sections where things are explained thoroughly, parts where they’re mentioned only in passing, segments where they are so subtle you’re not sure they were really there, and meaty laundry-lists of authors, film series, music, and TV shows. Unfortunately, the overall effect left me wondering about Cline’s exact intentions and experiences. There are so many things named in certain sections of the book that it almost feels like he must have looked up a list just to cram in a greater number of recognizable words. There are other sections where a given film or comic is slipped so deftly into the conversation and in such detail that it feels like Cline must talk about them in casual conversation, chatting about them as easily as breathing, and much more willingly. Still other times certain properties are mentioned, described, or hinted at before they simply vanish, never to be plot-relevant or even mentioned again, while still other things are mentioned with so little fanfare they might be easily missed as not being references at all. It’s hard to tell which pieces of nerd culture were included because they were Cline’s favorites, which were included because they were famous or influential, and which were included simply as an attempt to capture as expansive a sample of the wide unending ocean of pop culture as possible. Similarly, it left me wondering about the author’s exclusions: were some authors, games, or creators not mentioned because Cline was not a personal fan of theirs? Because they were not well-known enough? Because they wouldn’t feature in the plot? Or simply because there wasn’t space to stuff them into the book without making it far too long to read; an endless series of lists of names and works? I simply wasn’t always sure what was a reference and what wasn’t, and so I was left to examine each strange phrase or unusual term with suspicion, wondering whether it was an innocent sentence or another reference I wasn’t getting.
 
I think my confusion about this matter is best exemplified with other books: at the beginning of Ready Player One, in a list of important authors, sci-fi and cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson is absent. This was not odd in itself, since there are just so many important authors that many influential and important ones would surely be left out. However, pieces of Gibson’s influence were felt throughout the book, and terms that he coined which later entered the wider public and specialized vernaculars are dotted throughout it. It left me wondering if Cline was even aware of the influence Gibson has had, both on science fiction and certainly on Cline’s own book. Later, when one of Gibson’s works is mentioned by name, it became obvious that Cline did indeed know about him and had made his references intentionally. This left me wondering about Gibson’s exclusion from the list at the beginning of the book: was it done in favor of more widely known authors like Tolkien, or perhaps because Gibson is not a personal favorite of Cline’s? Maybe, as I had originally presumed, it was simply because there wasn’t enough space? My point is only that, when I caught a line or word that might have been a reference to something I recognized, I was only certain it really was an intentional reference about half the time, and I was never quite sure whether Cline knew what he’d inserted or not. Some things had attention drawn to them and were thus confirmed as intentional references with purpose, while others were never mentioned again, leaving things unclear as to whether they were intentional references or simply things that naturally tend to turn up in your lexicon if you’ve spent as much time immersing yourself in these things as Cline has.
 
One thing is for certain: Cline knows a lot. The sheer amount of information that he holds command of is staggering. And it’s not all just bullet point facts, either. He certainly didn’t pull most of it from some list or summary. No, much of what you encounter in this book comes from the type of familiarity and mastery that only comes from a lifetime of immersion and participation as a fan of the genres. While navigating Cline’s journey you get to see, everywhere you look, bits and pieces of the things that inspired him. Since each reader will have their own repertoire of inspiration, we will not feel the same experience as the author. We can never be sure if the things we see are all the same things another reader saw, or if they are all as Cline intended. In the end, I suppose they are simply the personal ‘Easter eggs’ that we each find throughout our journey, and each reader will have their own different set of eggs to find. Despite the strange uncertainty they left me with during my reading, this makes me utterly thrilled at the prospect of discussing this book with my friends so I may catch glimpses into their personal journeys, and share my own in turn.
 
The writing style also left me with questions. Chekhov’s Gun is loud and makes frequent appearances, with major events receiving plenty of foreshadowing. Even some smaller events or twists are plain to see a few pages before they happen. There are only a couple of foreshadowed events that do not come to pass (or, at least, I didn’t notice them,) and I can’t tell if they were an attempt to get the readers to cast doubt on all their other predictions, things I mistook for foreshadowing, completely forgotten, or simply pieces Cline felt he couldn’t add anywhere else. The book will sometimes describe past events in order to contextualize or prepare you for upcoming ones, but these usually occur soon before their relevant future event, leaving the few that are on a slow-boil easy to recall as you keep your eyes peeled for their inevitable resolution. Some seem out-of-place, inserted in the middle of some unrelated event or description, leaving you to wonder whether Cline forgot about them or had inserted them wherever he’d been writing when he looked over and saw them on his author’s notes. The jumps forward in time, on the other hand, are excellent, their skipped calendar days revealed to you in concise summaries so that we can return to the action more quickly. They perfectly exemplify the famous Hitchock-attributed quote: ‘What is drama but life with all the dull bits cut out?’ Cline deftly ushers us on when there’s nothing left to see so we may pass straight on to the next important or interesting moment. These scene jumps feel not unlike a stage play, where we see on stage only those moments crucial to the plot we are following. After all, who wants to see Hamlet relieve himself, or change into his pajamas? (Unless, of course, he’s got a good internal monologue to speak to us. Then we might tolerate such a bland physical action.) Cline’s other writing experience, especially his screenwriting, can be felt throughout the novel: there were a number of scenes involving multiple characters where two of them did almost all of the talking. While busy conversations are more easily written out on paper, they are more difficult to encompass on screen, with the added needs of presenting each speaker visually, or the added budget constraints of paying actors to speak. One or two conversations felt awkward, with characters largely ignored or eerily silent, but for the vast majority of the book Cline deftly used this method of writing to instead streamline conversations, improve their understandability, and make them easier to follow.
 
In addition to the major events, the character arcs were also fairly standard: you could probably summarize the arc of each character after hearing their role in the story: main character, main character’s best friend, female character, villain, mysterious elder figures One and Two, etc. We do see one major exception here that surprised me: I had presumed a couple of supporting characters were going to meet suffering or death in order to be used as examples of how far the antagonists would go and to add a sense of danger to the plot, but in the end only one of them served that purpose. The other remained until the end of the book. In the end though, the characters were enticing, entertaining, and extremely well written. I can’t think of another book in recent memory where I can so vividly and decisively picture the exact body language of a character like I can with our ‘main character’s best friend,’ Aech. (pronounced like the letter ‘H’) Cline’s writing really brings the characters to life and makes them feel like real people, whether we’re reading about the avatar they’ve created for themselves inside the virtual world or the real human manipulating the controls.
 
I finish now, looking back upon what I feared and knew would come to pass: most of my article seems awfully negative. But, in the end, I still wholeheartedly recommend this book, despite my confusions and misgivings stated above. Why, you may ask? Because, while I can easily quantify the things which irked me, I find it much more difficult to pin down exactly why I had so much fun reading this book. It enticed me to turn pages like I used to when I was little: every spare moment was spent reading this book, and whenever I was not reading it I was gripped by a burning desire to return to the world within its pages. It had fantastic action and lovable characters, took me to wonderfully detailed and fully-realized worlds, and I recaptured that sense of wonder and joy that only a few, truly engrossing books manage. Even aware of the problems I wrote about above, I still enjoyed every minute of my journey, and I don’t regret diving into this story at all. It may not be the linguistic or plot pinnacle of fiction, but books don’t have to be. Sometimes, they just have to be fun, and Ready Player One was very, very fun. I know I’ll be discussing this book and thinking about it for a very long time indeed, and always with a smile on my face.

---