Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a wonderful
cyberpunk story, covering the search for an epic Easter egg hidden in
cyberspace. The inventor of cyberspace as we know it has died, leaving no
heirs, but has left clues strewn throughout the bits and bytes of his creation
to find his inheritance. The path is littered with movies, video games, books,
comics, and other references to the 1980s, when the inventor grew up. (About
the only missing reference is to Tetris.) In itself, this is reason to read the
book: Liz and I amused ourselves by being able to say things like "Jordan
from Real Genius" and "Inigo Montoya" to each other as we
caught the references ahead of their explanation.
Our narrator and
hero is on a quest to find the egg. He meets interesting characters on the way,
including the (cyber) girl of his dreams. Of course, there are bad guys from
the evil corporation who want to take over cyberspace for their own ends;
they're on the hunt, too. Our hero almost keeps ahead of them, and outsmarts
them until the point where they kill him. Then it gets truly epic.
We listened to the
audiobook version of this in the car on our various peregrinations last summer
and fall. By Thanksgiving weekend, we were sufficiently sucked in that we
listened from chapter 33 to the end in the living room. Part of that delight
was the performance of Wil Wheaton --- yes, Wesley Crusher --- who just does a
stunningly wonderful job as the reader. Not only is he a good voice actor, but
he clearly was enjoying the material, and was particularly well-suited to read
it.
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