“Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline – A Virtual Quest for the Ultimate Prize

Ernest Cline is a young author whose debut novel, Ready Player One, has earned a tremendous following of people who simply cannot wait for him to bang out his next masterpiece. In this article, I’d like to discuss why I believe Ernest Cline to be an author you should keep an eye on, and of course, what makes Ready Player One such a compelling read.

To give you a bit of context, Ready Player One happens in the year 2044 where most people distract themselves from their daily troubles by plugging their minds a-la-Matrix into the OASIS, a virtual utopia where anyone can be whatever they want, on any planet they want.

The creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, seems to be the kind who gets easily bored; after putting his God-like powers to use and creating a whole virtual world, he hid a number of puzzles in it which eventually are supposed to lead those who solve them to the ultimate prize which grants them; unlimited power and that kind of stuff. Naturally, the protagonist, named Wade Watts, stumbles upon the first puzzles, at which point a hunt ensues, both in the real and virtual world, to find that source of unlimited power.

First off, I’d like to say that the plot itself is rather intriguing, and the setting makes it so that you don’t really have to suspend your disbelief should something quite unrealistic happen. In other words, with much of the story set in a virtual world, Ernest gave himself the freedom to come up with more surrealistic events, something which I always appreciate.

From a technical standpoint, the novel was written with a no-nonsense approach, which was quite welcome; there aren't any long and tedious passages (not that I remember anyways), and if you've read my reviews before, you’ll know it’s one of the things I hate the most. The action moves at a brisk pace, and both the real and virtual worlds have quite a lot of action happening in them.

In addition, I’d like to note that apart from being an enthralling read for the story and characters, it can also be seen as a social commentary on our habit of disconnecting ourselves from the real world and spending our time in a virtual one in hopes of forgetting about our troubles. However, regardless of how long we spend in that virtual world, the real one is what remains, and it’s the one we will inevitably have to deal with. 

If Ernest is to be believed, in the end, the real world will only serve for subsistence while all other aspects of life will be performed through a system such as the OASIS, where people can be what they want, look like they want and do what they want… after all, this is the kind of lie most people wouldn't have trouble living.

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Ernest Cline Ernest Cline describes himself as a spoken word artist, a screenwriter, and of course, a novelist. He spent most of his younger years working with computers and technology, which heavily influences his writing, or at the very least it did in his first and breakthrough novel, Ready Player One.