Today's Tom Sawyer. He gets by on you.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Book Review by Kerey McKenna

In a not-too-distant future beset by poverty, crime, and scarcity, a state-of-the-art virtual reality game offers an oasis from a world of devastation. It’s even called Oasis, the marketing department’s backronym for Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation. For the price of visor and gloves, even the poorest American can escape the drudgery of their everyday lives to delve into a virtual world built upon the culmination of over a century’s worth of telecommunications, visual media, and computer science. By the mid-21st Century, technology has finally delivered on the dreams of a generation of youth who spent the 1980’s escaping into fantasy by feeding their pocket change to arcade machines and huddling around a card table playing D&D.

The creator of Oasis, James Donovan Halliday, was himself a child of the 80’s, before growing up into a combination of Steve Jobs and Howard Hughes. He never forgot that his state-of-the-art simulation would not have been possible without the wood-paneled home computer he got for Christmas as a child. As his legacy, he makes sure that no one else forgets….

Upon his death, the estate of the reclusive billionaire releases an elaborate video game filled with more 80’s pop culture than if Cyndi Lauper’s tour bus crashed into VH1 headquarters and it was all filmed by John Hughes. The will states that like many programmers before him, Halliday has placed hidden content, an Easter egg, which can be found by dedicated players who can prove their aptitude at classic video games and love of 80’s culture. The player who completes the quest will be named Halliday’s heir and inherit a vast fortune and a controlling stake in his company—and therefore become de facto master of the virtual reality universe.

And so a generation of Easter egg hunters (later dubbed “Gunters”) immerse themselves in 1980’s culture and claim it as their own. Their playlists are filled with 80’s classics (transferred from vinyl or cassette for that analog-quality sound). They read back issues of Dragon magazine for clues on Halliday’s game design inspirations. Re-creations of arcade parlors are meticulously programmed so that the Gunters can use state-of-the-art virtual reality equipment to simulate playing classic Pac-Man in a pizzeria while MTV cranks the tunes in the background--cutting edge technology used to make a game within a game. The customized virtual environments created by players are just as likely to be modeled after a 1980’s rec room as an interplanetary spaceship (and some users opt to simply put their rec room inside their spaceship).

Enter our hero. Wade Watts, a pop culture-obsessed hacker with the disadvantage of being born into abject poverty. The virtual reality public school he attends offers an escape from his troubled home in “the stacks” (a slum town made by literally stacking RV’s into ramshackle high rise apartments). He has lots of practice on classic games that form the new arcade canon and his head contains more facts and stats about the 1980’s than Marty McFly’s Grays Sports Almanac. But with barely two quarters to rub together, he can’t afford the DLC gear and weapons to go questing with the other Gunters. At least, not until the long sought after quest begins practically in his own backyard. Wade is about to shoot to the top of the leader board and to the number one target for everyone else. And as an immortal classic movie once promised, “There can be only one”.

Ready Player One is a love letter, or perhaps more fittingly a fan-fic, dedicated to the pop culture of the 1980’s; the references to anything past 1990 could, it seems, be counted on one hand. Fortunately for readers not well-steeped in nerd culture and/or the minutia of early video game design, the book is rather patient in explaining the mechanics and significance of the cultural artifacts it excavates, such as the simple text commands of the early PC games, or that yes indeed Spiderman did have a giant robot at his command (when he was adapted for Japanese TV viewers as Supaidâman). I think to the degree that this works may well vary from reader to reader. For me it worked because our narrator Wade is a pop culture obsessive who is compelled to devour and then carefully curate every piece of trivia that interests him. And I found his interest infectious, but then I’m a receptive audience. (I am a reviewer for a blog called Nerds Who Read, after all).

I chose to read this book now because Stephen Spielberg is working on adapting the novel to the silver screen. It’s a promising venture: much of the forward momentum of the story is driven by a treasure hunt right out of The Goonies or Indiana Jones, exactly the sort of thing Spielberg could knock out of the park. However, I wanted to experience the novel before Spielberg’s version eclipses the original, as happened with Jaws and Jurassic Park. I also wanted to imagine a world of real geeks and nerds, not Hollywood-attractive actors plopped into frumpy clothing. To experience a story that was equal parts Charlie and The Chocolate Factory and The Last Star Fighter, as opposed to merely a studio’s calculated gambit to greenlight “the next Hunger Games.” And in hindsight it was good to get a sense of the full breadth of author’s pop culture obsession. Through the vagaries of IP law, the novel was able to drop a lot of references to all sorts of music, video games, movies, comic books, etc. For example, at one point the novel talks about a character heading out to a VR club, dressed to the nines in a Buckaroo Bonzai costume, and stepping out of a vehicle that is gestalt of the Back to the Future DeLorean, Ecto 1 from Ghostbusters, and KITT from Knight Rider. Steven Spielberg might have had the clout to get Warner Brothers to send the Looney Toons over to Disney to play for a bit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but will Disney return the favor and let Steven borrow their shiny new toy Star Wars, along with an Avenger or two? Will Universal license footage from John Hughes classics to their rival Warner Brothers? I foresee a lot of scenes and set pieces being either dropped entirely or replaced with references that fall under Warner Brothers' ownership.

But those are questions for another day. Presumably the movie’s opening day in 2018. For now grab the book, put on a Rush mix tape, chug a bottle of New Coke, and set your flux capacitor to 1985! I’ll start you off:

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. Learn more at www.watchcityfestival.com.