Review: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
Aug. 29th, 2012 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseReady Player One: The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas of the gamer subculture.
This book has caused rather a lot of cognitive dissonance in my usually-orderly analytical mind. It's overflowing with stylistic issues, common tropes, and troubling implications that seem to stem from lazy writing rather than narrative intention. Yet in spite of all that, it manages to be just not-bad enough to keep reading; and the combination of the demographic appeal and the author's enthusiasm was just enough to push it over into my personal "compulsively readable" territory - a feat that many objectively better-written books haven't managed.
The thing is, the plot's overly simplistic construction actually works to its advantage. Like the games it constantly references, it's designed as pure escapism: the good guys are likable stereotypes, the bad guys evil cardboard cutouts, the in-novel real world sucks so everyone escapes to whatever degree they can into the OASIS, their fully-immersive MMO-style version of the Internet. On a meta level, it actually almost works, in an amateur-hour-version-of-Phillip-K.-Dick sort of way.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with the narrative. Info-dumping is a plague throughout and is especially egregious in the early sections. Meta-narrative aside, one might wish for a little more character development on the part of the 'good' and 'bad' guys; one of the minor-but-niggling questions is exactly how likable/unlikable we might find these people if we met them outside their online personas, which we only rarely do. Several (fortunately short-ish) passages feel superfluous to the plot and could have been cut entirely, while there are a couple of later plot points that could have greatly benefited from a little advance buildup or even a single mention*. There's one instance of diversity-handling that frankly feels like exactly that - "oh hey, the book's almost over, I should put a minority character in. Hey, what if I make them two minorities? That's worth, like, double points, right?"
Honestly, whether or not I would recommend this book to someone depends a lot on their interests, their history, and their age. In many ways it's like an invitation to geek out with the author - "Hey, I liked that game too! Remember this show? And that movie? And did you ever find the secret room in...?" If you're willing/able to accept the invite, and to accept the book on its own terms, it's a surprisingly enjoyable read - all the more so because it's written for a subculture that doesn't yet have many stories by/about/for it. But if the aforementioned issues are particularly frustrating for you, or if you're simply not a member of the book's target audience, it's probably going to leave you scratching your head and wondering what all the fuss is about.
*Slightly spoilery mini-rant on this point: Speaking as someone currently going through the painstaking and painful process of teaching myself guitar, I have a hard time believing that the main character would have just "taught himself guitar" at some point in the past, to the point where he could accurately play a Rush song, and then have apparently dropped it (or at least never mentioned it) for a span of months or years, only to play it perfectly again on a moment's notice with no practice. Yes, I realize this is supposed to be in the OASIS and therefore have some wish-fulfillment aspects, but the implied correlation with real-world experiences is supposed to be part of the draw, and he very much does not describe playing even a Guitar Hero version (which would still require a certain amount of practice).
This book has caused rather a lot of cognitive dissonance in my usually-orderly analytical mind. It's overflowing with stylistic issues, common tropes, and troubling implications that seem to stem from lazy writing rather than narrative intention. Yet in spite of all that, it manages to be just not-bad enough to keep reading; and the combination of the demographic appeal and the author's enthusiasm was just enough to push it over into my personal "compulsively readable" territory - a feat that many objectively better-written books haven't managed.
The thing is, the plot's overly simplistic construction actually works to its advantage. Like the games it constantly references, it's designed as pure escapism: the good guys are likable stereotypes, the bad guys evil cardboard cutouts, the in-novel real world sucks so everyone escapes to whatever degree they can into the OASIS, their fully-immersive MMO-style version of the Internet. On a meta level, it actually almost works, in an amateur-hour-version-of-Phillip-K.-Dick sort of way.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with the narrative. Info-dumping is a plague throughout and is especially egregious in the early sections. Meta-narrative aside, one might wish for a little more character development on the part of the 'good' and 'bad' guys; one of the minor-but-niggling questions is exactly how likable/unlikable we might find these people if we met them outside their online personas, which we only rarely do. Several (fortunately short-ish) passages feel superfluous to the plot and could have been cut entirely, while there are a couple of later plot points that could have greatly benefited from a little advance buildup or even a single mention*. There's one instance of diversity-handling that frankly feels like exactly that - "oh hey, the book's almost over, I should put a minority character in. Hey, what if I make them two minorities? That's worth, like, double points, right?"
Honestly, whether or not I would recommend this book to someone depends a lot on their interests, their history, and their age. In many ways it's like an invitation to geek out with the author - "Hey, I liked that game too! Remember this show? And that movie? And did you ever find the secret room in...?" If you're willing/able to accept the invite, and to accept the book on its own terms, it's a surprisingly enjoyable read - all the more so because it's written for a subculture that doesn't yet have many stories by/about/for it. But if the aforementioned issues are particularly frustrating for you, or if you're simply not a member of the book's target audience, it's probably going to leave you scratching your head and wondering what all the fuss is about.
*Slightly spoilery mini-rant on this point: Speaking as someone currently going through the painstaking and painful process of teaching myself guitar, I have a hard time believing that the main character would have just "taught himself guitar" at some point in the past, to the point where he could accurately play a Rush song, and then have apparently dropped it (or at least never mentioned it) for a span of months or years, only to play it perfectly again on a moment's notice with no practice. Yes, I realize this is supposed to be in the OASIS and therefore have some wish-fulfillment aspects, but the implied correlation with real-world experiences is supposed to be part of the draw, and he very much does not describe playing even a Guitar Hero version (which would still require a certain amount of practice).
