FROM THE VAULT: 'Ready Player One' and the living death of science fiction

Ernest Cline wasn't bullied hard enough in school

Every book I could have read yesterday [read: this was originally published in 2018] flashed before my eyes last night as I closed Ready Player One. The blitz of bad writing and uninteresting geek factoid dropping gave me a migraine, which was reminiscent of Mike Dawson’s migraine in the 1992 cult-classic horror-adventure game, Darkseed, for the Amiga CD32. Oh, Christ, now he's got me doing it.

*pops an advil*

Ready Player One is the brainmanchild of Ernest Cline, the living embodiment of 9gag circa 2010. The rules of attraction being as they are, this edition even came with some surplus content by similarly-minded hack Andy Weir, which I skipped. The story centres around a boy named Wade, also known as Parzival, as he hunts for a multibillion-dollar easter egg left behind by dead eccentric game dev, James Halliday. Halliday was a huge 80s geek, and would famously fire employees for not being well-versed in his personal geek Canon, which is breaking labour laws and violating human rights very cool. After making headway in his quest, Wade knowingly and willingly sacrifices the irl lives of all of his remaining family members, along with dozens of strangers (some of whom were presumably children), and a kindly old mentor figure by allowing the villainous corporation vying for the prize to blow them all up rather than help them, so that he can protect the integrity of his favourite MMO from the people who want to slap it with a monthly fee. Wade makes sure all those innocent people died horribly for nothing when he decides to continue his mission solo instead of banding together with a group, even if it means he might lose the aforementioned MMO’s integrity, ostensibly because of pride. He wanted the game to remain free-to-play, but doesn’t want to share credit for that achievement. So, for the record, Wade’s hierarchy:

1. Personal Glory / Pride
2. His favourite MMO being FTP
3. The lives of his extended family / some friends / innocent bystanders

Eventual he falls for some girl he’s met on the internet, and starts to completely ignore his glorious quest like the ADHD-ridden boy he is. So, in all eventuality:

1. Some girl he met online
2. Personal Glory / Pride
3. His favourite MMO being FTP
4. The lives of his extended family / some friends / innocent bystanders

Wade fights to protect the MMO from business interests and monetization—but also everything in the game requires real world money to buy, and Wade (who grew up in poverty) spent most of his life unable to leave the starting area because he ostensibly couldn’t afford bus tickets. So, whatever, Wade goes on some wild adventure to collect three special keys, trying to beat the big corporate bad guys who, in spite of seemingly controlling the whole god damn world and even basically practising slavery, really just want a piece of this MMO action, which is sort of reminiscent of the nonsensical corporate villains of Yu-Gi-Oh! or Beybl—GOD DAMN IT, HE’S GOT ME DOING IT AGAIN!

Let me pull a blind Ben Blatt here: Cline’s favourite adjective is “1980s’,” and his favourite adjectival phrase is “a perfect re-creation.” It’s almost masterful how little writing Cline actually has to do. At one point Cline hand-waves a pizza parlor as being “a classic 80s pizza parlor.” Pray tell, what the fuck does that look like? And yet, for his sparse descriptions, Cline is a maximalist in every other sense of the word. This book reads like an unstable object that underwent geek-pop-culture-neutron-bombardment. Wade drives a car that is Marty’s DeLorean, and the Ghostbusters’ ambulance, and Kit from Knight Rider rolled into one. Why? What’s the significance? Cause those are all cars! D’uh! Cline could be likened to a postmodern mastermind in this way, stripping images of all significance aside from their status as images. Nothing exists to say fuck all about fuck all. There are two characters named after the two blades of the samurai daisho, and who pilot the Bebop from Cowboy Bebop, which they have named after Akira Kurosawa, and one of them can transform into Ultraman. None of this exists to tell us anything about their characters aside from that they happen to be Japanese. That is the most that anyone’s reference choices in this novel seem to tell us about anything.

Ready Player One reminds me a bit of Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe (which came out a year before Cline’s book) with its geek nostalgia references and themes, only Yu’s book was actualy about something. I’d be hard-pressed to relate to you one iota of meaning in Cline’s book. There’s an extended portion of the novel’s second act where the main character enters the arcade game Black Tiger. Seems like an odd choice? Surely there are better known or more exemplary arcade games to choose from? I wondered what the significance of Black Tiger could be, or if this reference would pan out down the line—I’m an idiot, of course. The Black Tiger reference most certainly did not pan out, and I should have predicted as much. As for why this game was chosen and not, say, something more inconic like Street Fighter or Dragon’s Lair? It was chosen arbitrarily, because it’s a game that Ernest Cline happens to like a lot.

Cline’s references also make certain aspects of his story surprisingly inaccessible. Like his character Halliday, he is unforgiving with his references, and they are, as above, completely fucking random and based exclusively on Cline's own tastes. Being pretty well-versed with 80s geek culture, I didn't initially have any hitches. I am a huge fan of at the very least Gary Gygax's First edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (fuck you, D&D revisionists!), and I like the arcade game Joust, so the early section in which Wade has to defeat a Demi Lich in the aforementioned arcade game was easy enough for me to access, even if the moving parts were all entirely arbitrarily-chosen, sure; I was also a virgin all the way through high school, so of course I understood the several allusions in the third act to the band Rush. But then out of fucking nowhere the most important section of the final puzzle involves a mostly unexplained reference to the lyrics of a song from the 1970s children’s show Schoolhouse Rock!, which I have never fucking seen (I assumed that that De La Soul hook was their original composition), was never adequately explained and never foreshadowed, and which, being unfamiliar with the reference, made almost no sense at all. It was like being in a dream.

But how different is this, I wondered, from the literary insistence that one be familiar with Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible? Is there something to be said about a revolutionary Canon which elevates Schoolhouse Rock! to the level of Paradise Lost? To Cline’s credit, the reference which turns out to be to Schoolhouse Rock! is initially believed by the evil establishment to be a reference to 1 Corinthians 13:13, or Catholic Martyrology, but isn’t. The establishment’s academic readings of the clue are dismissed as “obviously” ludicrous by the geeky protagonists, who quite quickly recognize the correct parsing. Halliday's Canon is essentially just a radically revisionist literary Canon, produced authoritarian-style by the whims of a single man, but is that any worse than one rigidly administered by ivory tower gatekeepers? Is this novel's completely arbitrary nonsensical style exercising something of the staunchly Anti-Literary? idk, maybe. The novel ends (spoilers?) on an aphoristic passage that seems to come completely out of nowhere and almost runs entirely counter to anything the book had previously established. On the very last page the dudes just… go outside and recognize that real life is beautiful, which makes you wonder why any of this mattered in the first place. Perhaps this is just the truest embodiment of a work of fiction which goes beyond “meaning.”

To me, Ready Player One is a sad testament of the true resignation of science fiction to the same forces of hapless insular hackery that ravage the fantasy genre. A self-supporting, self-legitimating machine, created by the pressures of genre-ghettoization within the industry. Andy Weir gets to write his piece and cash his cheque. Terrific. Meanwhile Junot Diaz’s Monstro dies in the delivery room. What is this book, really? It’s less of a novel, more of a catalogue; a list of items of interest. It’s a book that points at things. That’s Back to the Future. That’s Ladyhawke. That’s Schoolhouse Rock! Like a baby, uttering its first words; the ability to recognize is there, but the ability to comment or form critical insight is absent. An avatar incapable of levelling up.