Anybody read "Ready Player One"?

[n2doc]

Sounds promising. From a site I got to through the Tom the Dancing Bug website:

Ready Player One: the best science fiction novel I’ve read in a decade
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder on Monday, Aug 15th at 10:42am


(Read a PDF with the first three chapters of Ready Player One.)

It seems like every decade or so a science fiction novel comes along that sends a lightning bolt through my nervous system: Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). And I recently discovered what my mind-blowing novel for the 2010s is: Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Cline’s first novel starts out in the year 2044. The Great Recession (the same one we are in right now) is in its third decade. Unemployment is higher than ever (there's a two-year wait for a job at fast food chain restaurants), liquid fuel is extremely scarce, the climate is in awful shape, and famine, disease, and poverty are rampant across the planet.

The story is told by Wade Watts, an 18-year-old orphan who lives with 16 other people in trailer near the top of a tall stack of trailers in a crowded, crime-ridden trailer park on the outskirts of Oklahoma City (the suburbs are deserted, because hardly anyone can afford to buy fuel to travel by car). He doesn’t remember his father, who was shot by cops who caught him looting a grocery store for food after a power outage. And his mother overdosed on adulterated drugs when he was a kid. Wade now lives with his hateful young aunt and her creepy, fresh-out-of-prison boyfriend. They allow Wade to live in the trailer only because he's worth a weekly ration of food vouchers.

Wade spends most of his time in an abandoned van in a nearby junkyard, where he uses his school-issued laptop to stay jacked-in to a Snow Crash-like metaverse called the OASIS, which was created in 2012 by a brilliant game programmer named James Halliday ("a nerd uber-deity on the level of Gygax, Garriott, and Gates"). Halliday's OASIS is used all day by everyone with access to a computer, and according to Wade, it changed "the way people around the world lived, worked, and communicated. It entertainment, social networking, and even global politics. Even though it was initially marketed as a new kind of massively multiplayer online game, the OASIS quickly evolved into a new way of life."

more

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/15/ready-player-one-the-best-science-fiction-book-ive-read-in-a-decade.html

[mzteris]

1. thanks -

I'll look for it. Sounds pretty good.

[SheilaT]

2. I had it out of the library recently

but didn't even start it, as I had so many other books to read. Not sure if I'll get back to it.

But in fairness, I'm not really the target reader, since I'm 63 and there's a lot of high-tech kinds of s-f I just don't enjoy or appreciate properly.