Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline is a nice little novel which has generated a lot of talk in the blogosphere among people younger than myself—those who were teenagers in the late eighties, I suspect. This navel-gazing into the solipsistic past doesn’t do much for me as I am from the wrong era but the novel itself, when stripped of egregious references to pop culture, it is actually a strange kind of action tale taking place mostly in the dystopian (of course) future.  The action is largely game puzzles solved in a competition in a VR space that has kind of subsumed the real world, but there’s some real-world danger and people meeting in meatspace as well.

Yep, a standard, formulaic quest-type action novel.  Why the blogosphere love? One, Ernest Cline’s use of dialogue and description.  He’s no slacker and it shows. Two (and I think this resonates with everyone who has “read” it), it’s read in the audiobook by Wil Wheaton.

Wil made it for me.  His reading is just about perfect in nuance, pace and sardonic timing.  His acting chops have only gotten much better with age (although really, he wasn’t given much to work with as Wesley Crusher now, was he?).¹

Anyway, I enjoyed it during my commute (I should mention than I’m behind in writing about books since renovating my house but Fear Not! I shall catch up eventually) last year when I still did commute. Wil has also read Redshirts by John Scalzi and another Ernest Cline novel Armada, which I just started.  Don’t worry; I will review them both eventually.²

I do recommend this as your usual scifi stuff.  Popcorn need not be a bad thing, after all. It’s not all Neal Stephenson, is it?

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¹ No.  He wasn’t. I give him full credit for quitting; that took some cajones for a kid in the meat grinder of television.

² Be afraid.