Ernest Cline, Ernest Cline: Ready Player One (French language, 2013, Éditions Michel Lafon)
408 pages
French language
Published Feb. 4, 2013 by Éditions Michel Lafon.
Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook was released the same day; it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, who was mentioned briefly in one of the chapters.Ch. 20 In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association and won the 2011 Prometheus Award. A film adaptation, screenwritten by Cline and Zak Penn and directed …
Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American author Ernest Cline. The story, set in a dystopia in 2045, follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game, the discovery of which would lead him to inherit the game creator's fortune. Cline sold the rights to publish the novel in June 2010, in a bidding war to the Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House). The book was published on August 16, 2011. An audiobook was released the same day; it was narrated by Wil Wheaton, who was mentioned briefly in one of the chapters.Ch. 20 In 2012, the book received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association division of the American Library Association and won the 2011 Prometheus Award. A film adaptation, screenwritten by Cline and Zak Penn and directed by Steven Spielberg, was released on March 29, 2018. A sequel novel, Ready Player Two, was released on November 24, 2020.
Nine years later it still holds up as a great exercise in fun SF world building. Cline isn't a particularly gifted writer from a technical perspective, and some of the middle part is cringey but it is important to note that this is a book for children.
Eight years later, I needed to reread this slice of science fiction bacon, in anticipation of the sequel that comes out in November.
I just can't get into this book. The premise is corny, and reads like a screenplay. Maybe it's because I actually know what goes into building virtual worlds. Sure, lone-programmers built entire games--in the Atari era--but today games are built by teams of THOUSANDS of programmers, each toiling on a minute detail. People get famous developing techniques for animating hair, but nobody builds entire games all by themselves. Even if they do they must use tools developed by thousands more developers. Easter eggs are ferreted out by decompiling and analyzing source code. A process that's not nearly as glamorous as pouring over '80 pop culture for clues. Everything about the world this is set in is disorienting and hard to follow. You're never quite sure what the rules are, and without any visuals to back it up you're lost. I'm sure the movie is better, though I've not seen that …
I just can't get into this book. The premise is corny, and reads like a screenplay. Maybe it's because I actually know what goes into building virtual worlds. Sure, lone-programmers built entire games--in the Atari era--but today games are built by teams of THOUSANDS of programmers, each toiling on a minute detail. People get famous developing techniques for animating hair, but nobody builds entire games all by themselves. Even if they do they must use tools developed by thousands more developers. Easter eggs are ferreted out by decompiling and analyzing source code. A process that's not nearly as glamorous as pouring over '80 pop culture for clues. Everything about the world this is set in is disorienting and hard to follow. You're never quite sure what the rules are, and without any visuals to back it up you're lost. I'm sure the movie is better, though I've not seen that yet.
Probably the cheesiest book I've ever read.
This is one that I have listened to many times, and did it again this past week - love it! Love all the pop culture references, and even I have had to google some at first even though I was a kid in the 80s. And I'm one of those people that I'm fairly certain is few in number that like both the book and the movie. Yes, they are pretty different in execution, and different in the pop culture icons that are used (mostly 90s for the movie), but they both keep the same points and lessons, which is the most important part - but you have to decide if you agree with that yourselves, obviously. :D
Amazing book. Simultaneously SciFi and full of 80s references.
despite being so naïve, it's still a fun read.
Futuristic techno-porn. Fast-paced storyline that keeps you wanting to know what is going to happen next.
So much better than the movie. I won't explain why so as not to spoil it, but it felt like the book had a lot more nuance and depth.
Well, I can see why this divided readers as much as it did, but despite being a pretty much unending chain of 1980s esoteric name dropping, I had a good time with it.
Meh. While there certainly is a lot of imagination and work put into the plot, the actual writing is so BANAL that it ends up reading like a laundry-list namedrop of video game and 80's pop culture references draped over a freshman creative writing effort.
This book is absolute garbage. It is a one-celled animal in a Day-Glo banana hammock. Nothing more than a list of 80s references forced sideways into writing so abysmal that I've literally encountered better writing by third graders. It disgusted and angered me to consider the fact that this has been deemed worthy of publication. Bonus: the narrator is so solipsistic and sexist that I'd be shocked if the MRA crowd hasn't made him a hero. 100% the worst thing I've ever read, and its popularity is endlessly confusing and disappointing. Normally I try to just LPET (let people enjoy things) but this misbegotten pap is a pimple on the ass of literature and I am duty bound to oppose it with all my might.
Full disclosure, I tried twice but couldn't finish it because I have a modicum of self-preservation and self-respect left.
This isn't high-brow literature or flawless story-telling by any stretch of the imagination. It is, however, damn good fun.
Having been born in the mid-80s and growing up in the 90s, many of Ready Player One's references were a little lost on me. But as a complete nerd, I didn't care and loved every second of it.
It's a fun story, with a few predictable turns, a deus ex machina too many, sometimes laying on the nostalgia a bit thick, and gender/race/ableist tokenism that borders on excessive. But it IS fun.
If those few concerns (and they are quite minor, only appearing a couple of times each in the whole story), this could easily have been a five star book.
Pure fun!
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Ready Player One. All in all, I enjoyed it, but it took work. The biggest challenge for me is that I have no particular affection for the 80s. I found a lot of the book to be, as other reviewers have put it, useless nostalgia porn. It wasn't until the end that Cline had enough depth and tension to tell a compelling story, but he didn't do very much with it. Was he trying to? I doubt it and in the end, that's fine. The book was fun and, for many people, entertaining. But for me, it didn't live up to the hype.
