I've had the print version of this sat on my shelf for quite some time, but haven't managed to get very far through it. With the film coming up and a couple of long car drives for work, I decided to cheat a bit and grab myself the Audible version. (Might be worth a free trial to have a listen if you're still interested after this).
The book follows the exploits of Wade Watts, a school student who lives in an energy-scarce dystopia, where most people are too poor to do anything other than live inside the OASIS, a fully immersive VR system, which acts like an MMO RPG on crack. People spend their lives living, working, gaming and dying in the OASIS.
In the history of the book, the creator of the OASIS James Halliday has just died, setting off the world's greatest in-game quest. Whoever collects the three keys, passes through the three gates and finds Halliday's Easter Egg gains access to all his shares and effective control of the entire system. (As well as several hundred billion dollars. Honestly, the nerds are more excited about all the sweet loot on the quest.)
Wade has spent the last five years hunting for the egg, which mostly involves obsessively watching, playing and reading every bit of pop culture from the 1970s-80s, in which Halliday spent his childhood years.
And so Wade begins his quest, playing as his in-game avatar Parzival, aided and abetted by various online friends, Aech, Shoto and his crush Art3mis.
Which is all the excuse Cline needs to write a book which is nothing more than a nostalgia fest to the 80s. Anyone who was born in the 70s and has a hint of geekiness to them is likely to spend the book going "oh yeah, I remember that", which I assume is the primary aim. Fair warning, you really need to like lists to listen to the audiobook. I don't care how much of a fan favourite Wil Wheaton is, he can't make reading out a list of Atari games interesting.
What's even worse is the need to frequently read out the highscores of the various people involved in the quest. It's a problem I noticed in the various GameLit books I've read recently, which contained long lists of stats. I'm aware of the fact that people are snobby about abridged versions of books, but this one perhaps would have been improved by a little light editing.
The plot itself is fairly interesting, mostly in terms of the puzzle element of the quest and how things work out in the game world. However, it does feel a bit too easy in some cases. The sheer volume of media that Wade has consumed in his life to set him up for the quest is also somewhat unbelievable. I'm tempted to go back and do the maths, but I can't really bear all those lists again. Feel free to do it for me.
The other point I should probably touch on is the "romance" between Wade and Art3mis, which various people over the years have suggested is a bit too close to harassment to be reasonable. I didn't quite get that, mainly because the section of the book in which Wade is being particularly pathetic reads quite well as an emotionally useless teenager just working out what fancying someone is like. There is a decent arc of his slowly improving emotional maturity, and really the romance takes a back seat to the "hey, what about this game! Remember it?" aspect.
It's not a particularly brilliant thriller, and is a bit too deep in its own technobabble to ever really get up a good head of steam. I've got through it, but it did feel like a quest of my own, especially when I could predict where all the Chekhov's guns would go off. May or may not watch the film, but certainly have no need to read the book again.
Not recommended.
Tagged: Book GameLit Cyberpunk Novel Audio