Ready Player One

Ernest Cline

Aug 2011 · Ready Player One Book 1 · Sold by Ballantine Books

About this ebook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

“Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly

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

In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days.

When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. 

Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club

“Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost

“An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN

“A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe

“Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR

“[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

Ratings and reviews

As a fan of all things nerd and being of the once shunned nerds of the 80s and 90s I am disappointed. The bright side...the protagonist mirrors the majority of society. Oblivious to the reality of an impending collapse of society he wallows in sad vigor perpetuated by his masters, deep within their matrix like prison. The author lets his politically correct ideals flow with pointless narrative. If you must read it or don't know how an MMORPG works, the author goes into boring detail. Waste not, want not.

This book maynbe a new low point in literature. Terribly written, awful, unlikeable characters, and just kind of sad and pathetic. I finished it, but got nothing out of it. Nothing. Its boring and repetitive. The characters suck. The pathetic worship of nostalgic "geek culture" is depressing. Anticlimactic ending. Just so, so bad. The writer apparently worships garbage from the 1980s while hamfistedly attacks religion and people of faith....and then essentially abandons the theme. The "romance" sub plot is embarrassingly poorly constructed and realized. The fact that this book is so lauded in certain circles makes me worry about the abject stupidity and dumbing down of our population.

Forewarning: if people making references to stuff you've heard of is your medicine, you will disagree with my review. This book was so tedious. It was a novella of interesting quasi-apocalyptic-future sci-fi wrapped in a giant blanket of 80's references (and other geek-culture references, too). You could barely read this book without reading the brand of a video game, or seeing a character pat themselves on the back for knowing something "obscure." There are a few scenes that really are fun, and unsurprisingly they're the ones where it isn't a festival of nerd in-jokes. Mostly I spent my time rolling my eyes at the agonizing, never-ending parade of shoutouts. Hopefully for his next novel, Cline drops the references and builds his own world. He wasn't a terrible author, this is just a 70 page book with 300 pages of padding and aspirations for cult-classic status.

About the author

Ernest Cline is a #1 New York Times bestselling novelist, screenwriter, father, and full-time geek. He is the author of the novels Ready Player One and Armada and co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. His books have been published in over fifty countries and have spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games.