Book Review of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

If you've ever loved '80s pop culture, you will love this book.

You will also fall head over heels with it if you have any interest in gaming, cyberpunk, dystopian worlds, human rights, media manipulation, corporate attempts to monetize the whole damn world, 1% v the 99%, hacker ethics, copyright issues and good, old, rip roaring, page turning stories.

Needless to say, I was entranced from the word go.

I was sent Ready Player One by a friend's mother, who had already devoured its content. Having now followed her through the pages, I can understand her evangelism on the subject. I'm right there with her, telling everyone, telling you.

This is a blooming good book. It's a story you won't want to leave. The first thing I did upon finishing - other than exhaling a heart-felt 'wow' and staring into space for a fair few minutes - was to scramble towards my keyboard, hunting the internet for a sequel. There shall and must be a sequel. I can't not be in that world, now I know it exists! But there is nothing more.  Author Ernest Cline gave us Ready Player One, a beautifully self-contained tale with no threads left hanging, but nothing else in the same universe.

That's an error. Consider this an open plea to Mr Cline - MORE MORE MORE!

On the bright side, Ready Player One is in the progress of being turned into a movie. Read it now, so you're ahead of the game; already knowing all about it before theater going audience think that they discovered it first. Be that cool.

Wade Watts lives in The Stacks, on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, in the year 2044.

A generation before, this would have been a trailer park, but the world has changed and space alongside cities is at a premium. Trailers are no longer in nice neat rows. They are piled up in tottering towers, platform by platform, scaffolding searing the skies.

These are The Stacks, amongst the poorest residences in a poverty stricken world.

Reality isn't fabulous in The Stacks, nor is it particularly wonderful anywhere else. Humanity used up all of the oil and you'd be amazed how much global infrastructure relied upon that natural resource. As cities and civilizations fell under the pressure, dispossession, dislocation and war became the name of the game.

Actually no. The Game was called The Oasis. It was the one shining light in the lives of most people, no matter where they lived in the world. A virtual reality which fully immersed its players into a universe where everything was possible.

People played there. People worked there. People frequently spent the greatest portion of their lives inside its better-than-life digital environs. As a high school student, Wade goes to school there.

The Oasis made its inventor James Halliday the richest, most influential person in the world. Then he died. All that power and wealth was suddenly up for grabs, with very predictable results thwarted by the man himself.

Ready Player One begins with the announcement of James Halliday's will.  A contest - open to all - with his place in the Oasis as the one and only prize. From world leaders to schoolboys in The Stacks, the opportunity and rules were the same. All anyone had to do was find the Easter Egg hidden somewhere in his game.

And survive those who would stop at nothing in real life to secure such power for themselves.