"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline (SPOILER ALERTS)

"Ready Player One" is a novel written in 2011 by Ernest Cline.  It is a science fiction and dystopian story about the future.  The book is set in the year 2044, where Earth is a very ugly place, overrun by overpopulation, unemployment, and energy shortages.  The main protagonist, eighteen-year-old Wade Watts, is a very poor young man who only feels alive when he's plugged inside the virtual reality utopia known as the OASIS. Like for most people living on Earth, the OASIS is a virtual get-away for Wade.  One day, the creator of the OASIS dies and decides to leave his massive fortune, as well as the rights and future of the OASIS, to whomever can navigate their way through his brilliant maze of riddles and clues within this virtual reality world. Wade, along with the entire population,  have to race to find this fortune (called an "Easter Egg") before it falls into the wrong hands.

The theme of a dystopian future is a common one amongst film, television, and novels now-a-days.  However, "Ready Player One" does a great job of showing how the future could be in a new and refreshing way.  Yes, Earth is as bad as it could possibly get (and yes, we have seen this a hundred times), BUT the solution is a completely different one. Normally, when life goes back on Earth, people look to space to start creating a new society in which to live.  With this novel, people turn to virtual reality. To escape their horrible, daily lives, people simply put on a headset and slip into a whole different world; one that they have control over.  This is both super interesting and scary: interesting because people actually have the ability to do this now with the Oculus and HTC Vive; scary because it won't be too long before people start spending more and more time in virtual reality and less and less time in the real world.  Hopefully society will not allow Earth become as bad as it is in this book and we will not need to escape into a virtual world. Also, hopefully people will not ignore the real world for the virtual one. But it is nice to know that there is a potential escape, in case things get really bad.

The worlds of "Ready Player One" are split between the real one and the one created by the OASIS.  At first, the virtual world is the more interesting of the two, with battles, chases, video games, and intricate problem solving.  But, as the story goes on, the attention (and action) is re-focused back into the real world.  I appreciate how they kept going back to the real world to let readers know that the characters actually do exist in the real world as well as the virtual one.  It also gave a glimpse of what the characters were doing when they were plugged into the OASIS, which usually turned out to be a whole lot of nothing. One of my favorite parts in the book was when Wade and his love interest, known in the story as Art3mis, finally meet in person.  The two are so nervous about their first, in-person encounter throughout the majority of the book. When they finally meet, they realize they were just as they expected and end up falling even more in love than they were before. I thought this whole plot point was very sweet and a good way to connect with the audience.

The main plot point of "Ready Player One" revolves around players within the OASIS trying to find it's creator's fortune, based off of clues left to them. Many of the clues are based off of pop culture references from the 1980s. Many things are referenced and talked about in depth, including movies, television shows, music, video games, and various cultural movements and events that happened during the 80s.  It was very cool to read about so much '80s pop culture and I was honestly proud of all of the references I was able to catch and understand, even though I still had to look some things up.

The main protagonist in "Ready Player One" is a huge underdog. He starts off as a poor eighteen-year-old boy who doesn't have much going for him in life.  Through hard work, determination, and ambition, he makes it through all of the challenges placed before him and finally achieves everything he has been working towards. I love a good underdog story and am glad that the main character was someone very down to earth and relatable.

Overall, I really enjoyed "Ready Player One" and am super excited that its being made into a film.  It was a great, new, and refreshing glimpse into the future. It was also a very scary glimpse about how virtual reality could advance and how it could potentially take over our lives, for better or for worse.