Monday, May 6, 2013

A Book A Week - Week 18: Ready Player One

This week's book:
    Ready Player One   by  Ernest Cline

Grade:   C

I'm a day late with this week's book, not because I'm lazy, but because I needed time to digest it.  Which is maybe a sign of my ambivalence.
  See... the problem is that I'm supposed to like this novel.  It's aimed squarely at me.  And I don't mean 'me' in a metaphorical sense, or in a member-of-a-demographic sense, no, I'm the guy in the crosshairs.  I'll explain below, but for now you need to know that I should have every reason to rave about Ready Player One.  But I can't.

Truth to tell, the book actually pissed me off.  And that's why I had to wait.  I had to cool down, to try to give it a reasoned, cautious review rather than the one I had boiling in me yesterday.

Here's the deal:  the book is set thirty years in the future, when the planet is ruined and awful corporations rule the slagheap that's left.  Humanity has largely retreated into an online space called OASIS, where you can go to school, make real money, live, work, play, and even have cyber-sex if you want.  It's one great-big video game.
    The creator of that video game - think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one - has died, and left his fortune to the person who can find the Egg hidden in the game.  As a child of the 80's, the creator has populated the game with his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of 80's pop culture.  The people who are trying to find the Egg, and the multi-billion dollar fortune behind it, immerse themselves in 80's movies, music, and especially video games.  Even the smallest detail of Silver Spoons could be a clue, and it's certainly better living in a re-hashed 80's simulation than in the real world.

The author backs up dump truck after dump truck of 80's trivia, all in the guise of the hero working his way through the quest of earning the three keys to win the Egg.  You name it, Mr. Cline's got it, every movie, every music video, every console game, every coin-op game, every poster, every computer.  Every page of the book, practically, full to overflowing with 80's nostalgia.  Since I was a child of the 80's I got every single reference, the first time through, no explanation necessary even though the author provided one.

After the first ten pages I was bored with it.  I was there, after all, and the 80's kind of sucked.  After the first few chapters I wanted it all to stop.  I was a nerd, I played through Tomb of Horrors more than once, and reading about it in a novel was like strolling through a bad museum exhibit.  Halfway through I started getting mad.  How dare he co-opt my childhood?  This was my history he was playing with.  Mine.  Not yours.  By the last few chapters I was just eager for it all to end.

We get it, Mr. Cline, you loved the 80's.  But that doesn't give you permission to do... this.  Hands off my past, jackass.  Now I understand when old hippies say 'yeah... but you weren't there, man... you had to be there...'  God help me.

 Second, and not nearly as subjective, the novel is about a kid's adventures inside a video game.  So when you're reading, you're not really reading his exploits, you're reading about him reading about his exploits.  It's like watching someone else solve a crossword puzzle, and who gives a shit about that?
   There's more here than the author uses, he barely touches on the alienation and despair rampant in his future dystopia.  The point should be the hollowness of the escape into the game, rather than the excitement of the main character living a calendar year - no lie - in one thirty-foot-square room as he chases the Egg and the creator's fortune.  So many more layers he could have built that just aren't there.

Third, my 'don't diss the genre' note:  I found, I think, one passing mention of William Gibson and Neuromancer.  One.  In a novel which is essentially an 80's nerd squeal, the author rushes past the entire reason he can get away with a book like this, and gives no credit to the man and the novel who created the cyberspace he abuses.

If you had a friend who built his own Altair, if you played Zork, and Asteroids, and Tempest, if you watched anime before anyone else knew the Japanese made cartoons, if you know how to use a 300 baud modem on a rotary phone, if you made appointment TV on Saturday morning well into your late 20's, if you know what I mean when say 'the Blue Box,' if you know who Gary Gygax was, if you at all enjoyed living any part of the 80's even the tiniest bit, then please, please, please, don't read this book.  It's just gonna piss you off.
    If you weren't alive then, go crazy.  The 80's stuff will seem like friendly nostalgia, but the narrative is still pretty mediocre.


Next week:
   The Golem and The Jinni   by Helene Wecker
   Hot off the presses, brand new fiction.  Historical and 'magical realism?'  How's that work?

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