Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline
Summary
By 2045 the real world has decayed into stacked trailer slums and fuel shortages, and most people spend their waking hours inside the OASIS, a fully immersive virtual universe built by the reclusive designer James Halliday. When Halliday dies, he leaves his fortune and control of the OASIS itself to whoever can find the Easter egg he has hidden somewhere inside it, using his own obsessive knowledge of nineteen eighties movies, music, and video games as the trail. Wade Watts, eighteen and orphaned, lives in a vertical stack of trailers outside Oklahoma City and hunts the egg under the avatar name Parzival, alongside friends he knows only online: Art3mis, whose real name is Samantha Cook, and Aech, who turns out to be a woman named Helen Harris hiding behind a male avatar for safety. Wade becomes the first to solve Halliday's opening puzzle, a feat that makes him briefly famous and a target for Innovative Online Industries, a corporation racing to win the OASIS by any means, including a bombing that kills Wade's aunt. Wade goes into hiding, gets himself deliberately indentured to the corporation to hack its internal network from within, and exposes its plan to murder rival players. In the final contest, staged as a mecha battle at Halliday's virtual castle, IOI detonates a weapon that kills every avatar present, but a saved extra life lets Wade keep going. He solves the last puzzles using an old arcade game called Tempest and a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and wins Halliday's fortune and the OASIS itself. He meets Samantha in person for the first time, and the book ends with him choosing, for once, to stay logged off.
Cline structures the whole novel as a scavenger hunt built from real nineteen eighties trivia, and reading it means recognizing, or not recognizing, a constant stream of references to arcade games, John Hughes movies, and tabletop role playing; readers who grew up on that culture describe the effect as pure nostalgia, while others find the trivia recitations slow the plot down more than they earn.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize took up Ready Player One, but science fiction's own prizes recognized it in full. The Libertarian Futurist Society gave it the 2012 Prometheus Award for Best Novel, and the American Library Association's Alex Award, given to adult books with strong appeal to teenage readers, came the same year. Crown bought the novel in a bidding war in June 2010, and Warner Bros. bought the film rights the same day the publishing deal closed, a year before the book was in print.
Steven Spielberg's 2018 film adaptation, starring Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke, drew a mixed critical response, praised for its visuals and pacing and criticized for characters thinner than the trivia driven plot allows, and did strong box office without collecting a major award of its own. Cline had already hidden a real Easter egg inside the novel's own promotional website at publication, awarding a DeLorean to the first reader who solved it, claimed by Craig Queen in August 2012, nearly four years before the film began shooting in June 2016.