I’m finally listening to the audiobook of the much-talked-about Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, read by Internet super-celebrity Wil Wheaton.
Though I’m only a handful of chapters into it, this book is clearly an 80s geek subculture nerdgasm from start to finish. It’s fascinating, hilarious, and depressing – despressing because of how many of the obscure references I understand (like, roughly, all of them).
Now I’m going to take the fanboy hat off and put on the author hat. This book has a lot of exposition. I mean a lot of it. There are what I assume are pages and pages and pages of telling, not showing. I think there was one whole chapter telling Halliday’s life story. He’s basically John Carmack on steroids, which is neat if you know anything about computer gaming history, but it really didn’t do much to serve the story right then.
This book is yet another first-person-sarcastic-narrator book. I’m starting to think of all of these books as extended blog posts. This is not necessarily a good thing, in my opinion. I’m thinking that I will distinguish myself in my writing career by being one of the only authors never to write a first person book. Or perhaps to be the first author to write a first person book from the perspective of someone without a sense of humor. Or, I could write the same first-person book as everyone else and make some money. Probably I’ll do that last thing.
Ready Player One is yet another dystopian future book, this time with an energy crisis that destroys the near-future world. The green movement subtext is not very subtle. My jaw still hurts from being punched in the face with it. Personally, I have a hard time believing that fossil fuels are going to run out in our lifetimes.
Now if I can put on my programmer hat on for a second, there are a number of engineering problems with this Oasis system. I can buy the VR goggles (see Oculus Rift), but the haptic gloves stretch the limit of credibility. Even suspending disbelief enough to assume they work exactly as described and you can reach out and touch objects in the virtual world, how would you make your avatar *move* in Oasis? Wade runs quite a bit when he goes to the Tomb of Horrors. Would you have to dogpaddle your hands in the air? There’s nothing hooked up to your real-world legs. Maybe there are footpedals on the floor that aren’t described. Or maybe a virtual keyboard and mouse appears, or a virtual game controller perhaps, that you operate with your virtual hands and fingers. That’s not even talking about the two sentences of hand-waving magic that somehow allows Oasis to support millions of simultaneous, realistically-rendered users without any lag or processing delay. I don’t even think *that* is possible in our lifetimes.
Anyway, it’s a fun book. I’m not really sure if the story is any good yet, though. Mostly it’s a trip down memory lane.
