Ready Player One
Ernest Cline, 2011
Science fiction Young adultHistoryContemporary fiction
A teenager in a collapsing near-future hunts for a fortune hidden inside a vast virtual world, where knowing 1980s pop culture is the only edge. A fast-moving, witty hunt through a bleak future and a nostalgic virtual world, with a lonely teenage voice at its center.
Feels like dread and wonder. About memory and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy 1980s pop culture, puzzle-solving, and stories about escaping a grim reality into a game. The constant stream of references can be a lot if you don't share that nostalgia, and the near-future setting is bleak.
Why read it
It offers a brisk, idea-rich escape and a sharp look at how nostalgia and online life can shape a teenager's sense of self.
A page from the book
What a sitcom family can give a kid who has none.
Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious). Ernest Cline.Before Ready Player One, Cline co-wrote the 2009 film Fanboys and spent years collecting 1980s arcade games and memorabilia.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Ready Player One for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy 1980s pop culture, puzzle-solving, and stories about escaping a grim reality into a game. The constant stream of references can be a lot if you don't share that nostalgia, and the near-future setting is bleak.
- What is Ready Player One like?
- A fast-moving, witty hunt through a bleak future and a nostalgic virtual world, with a lonely teenage voice at its center. Feels like dread and wonder. About memory and family.
- What should I read after Ready Player One?
- If you liked Ready Player One, try Neuromancer (William Gibson), The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman) and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Ransom Riggs).
A taste of the feed
The moment you decide something strange never happened.
I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane · Neil Gaiman
A man buys supplies for a disaster and grieves the ordinary world mid-aisle.
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
Station Eleven · Emily St. John Mandel
A river you could swim in, and a man who cannot stop explaining it.
WILLY WONKA: Nothing wrong with it, my boy! Nothing! Nothing at all! It’s all chocolate! Every drop of that river is hot melted chocolate of the finest quality. The very finest quality. There’s enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well! Isn’t it terrific? And just look at my pipes! They suck up the chocolate and carry it all away to all the other rooms in the factory where it is needed! Thousands of gallons an hour, my dear children! Thousands and thousands of gallons!
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory · Roald Dahl
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