Title: Ready Player One
Author: Ernest Cline

Publisher: Crown
Edition: Kindle
Pages: 384
Originally published: 2011

Genre: Science fiction
The dice landed on: 4
Did I finish?: Yes
Do I like the cover?: It’s ok.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

This was an exciting read and it was really hard to put the book away to go and do something else, like work.

In many ways it’s a classical thriller with our hero chasing the prize in competition with both friends and some really evil enemies. It’s just that everything is set in a virtual world. Still, the real world also intrudes now and then, and at certain points become very significant.

The book is absolutely packed with references to 80′s pop-culture, videogames, movies and geek heroes. I was a teenager in the 80′s, but I still didn’t know about half of the things mentioned in this book. Probably because I was never interested in computer games and found amusement arcades and science fiction movies really scary (no, I wasn’t very brave). Still, the author manages to keep this interesting for me too, so I guess it would work for most other people.

As I mentioned, it’s very exciting. But, Wade is a bit too good at all the challenges. I would like him to struggle a bit more with them too, not only with the people he meets inside and outside the OASIS. All in all, there aren’t enough challenges and surprises in it to make it an outstanding book.

Still, it’s good fun and a thrilling read.

 
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