This is primarily a Book Review (and only secondarily a bit of a
movie review which appears at the end).
[Spoiler Alert: The book was much,
much better, but the movie was ok and worth watching although, in my opinion,
the very best parts of the book were omitted.]
This novel, Ready Player One (2011), by Ernest Cline won the 2012
Prometheus Award for best new libertarian-themed Science Fiction novel from the
Libertarian Futurist Society – of which I am a member – and, in my experience,
their winners and nominees are usually very good SF reads. I read this book soon after it was published
and found it to be a delight.
(Steven Spielberg has just produced and directed a feature film of
this book, recently released, and the screenplay was co-written by author
Cline. Spielberg said that making this
movie was the “most difficult movie I’ve done since Saving Private Ryan.”)
The book’s story takes place in the future dystopian 2040s, mainly
in youth Gamer culture, at a time when Virtual Reality has evolved so far that
most people in the entire world are totally wrapped up in it to escape the
depressing real world. It is addictive. It is Dungeons and Dragons, etc., gone space
age wild in 5D.
An incredibly powerful and realistic virtual reality platform called
OASIS (i.e., the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation)
had long become the world’s greatest hit by far. Everybody is hooked into it, and the OASIS currency
(i.e., its virtual credits) is the most stable money in the real dystopian
earth. This virtual reality is a
universe onto itself.
The genius creator of OASIS, James Halliday (1972-2040), has recently
died and left behind in his will the ultimate Easter Egg hunt. If you solve all of the puzzle game quests
hidden within his vast OASIS simulation, you will inherit his incredibly huge
fortune as well as having complete control of the OASIS virtual world. There are Three Keys to find (the Copper,
Jade, and Crystal keys) and also Three Gates to navigate in order to win. The worldwide competition to solve the puzzle
is intense, and sinister corporate powers (the “IOI”) covet this powerful prize
and muster enormous financial and technological resources to grab it by hook or
crook.
Some of our young Gamers want to win the quest in order to keep the
OASIS free, as Halliday had intended it.
They are called “Gunters”, i.e., egg hunters. The relentless sinister IOI corporate competitor
puppet avatars are called “Sixers” (or, contemptuously, “Sucksers”).
Halliday, the OASIS creator, had been a big fan of the era that he
grew up in around the 1980s – long before our youngest gamers in the story were
born – so knowledge of the culture of the 80s and the entire late-20th
century seems to be critical in solving the Easter Egg hunt. One must become a cultural historian-archaeologist
of sorts to succeed.
Our hero, Wade Watts, is an orphaned high school senior (in a
virtual high school within the OASIS simulation) living in real life in poverty
in the US mid-west, and he absolutely lives for his “life” within the OASIS
virtual reality. He is a dedicated Gunter. His avatar is called Parzival (the Arthurian
seeker of the Holy Grail), and, because he is so poor, his virtual credits/ props/
tools/ weapons within the game-world of OASIS are extremely modest. But he does have a cheap beat-up (virtual)
spacecraft in the OASIS universe which is a Firefly-class transport
vessel modeled after (Joss Whedon’s) ship Serenity. [Being a huge Firefly fan myself, I
love it!] Wade has mastered most of the
cultural references of Halliday’s youth era, e.g., the old classic video games,
movies, TV shows, music, etc. that Halliday loved. And he has a few avatar friends within the
OASIS virtual reality that he trusts, while never actually having met them yet
in the flesh.
Caveat: I am most decidedly NOT,
nor have I ever been, a “gamer” of any sort.
Yet I love this book. I hate
games and always have, whether they are card games, video games, parlor games,
board games, or so-called “sports” team athletic games (I rather liked boxing
or solo climbing instead). I did like
many of the theatrical films referenced in the book as well as a lot of the
great music of the era. I haven’t a clue
about many of the other circa 1980s cultural references here, but it does not
in any way detract from my enjoyment of the book.
Even though this book won the Libertarian Futurist Society’s
Prometheus Award, political themes are not explicitly emphasized much at all. It’s more implied. Libertarian issues in the book would
include: personal privacy, individual
self-determination, rejection of regimentation and conformity, and the fight
against tyrannical elites.
Here is one of the book’s few mentions of government by our 2040s
protagonist narrator, Wade/Parzival:
“I didn’t bother with [elections for the US government], because I
didn’t see the point. The once-great
country into which I had been born now resembled its former self in name
only. It didn’t matter who was in
charge. Those people were rearranging
deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it. Besides, now that everyone voted from home,
via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality
TV personalities, or radical televangelists.” [emphasis added] (This book was published in 2011; does that
last sentence not jump out at you today?)
The villain in this book is not a government, but a huge corporate
entity that aspires to the same levels of classic governmental power,
corruption, and control by using the timeless monopolistic government
strategies of coercion and murder to achieve complete domination. The corporation is called IOI (Innovative
Online Industries), and its villainous CEO is Nolan Sorrento. A highly rigged system of Indentured
Servitude ensnares people into debt and then coerces them to work for IOI to
work off the debts, but it is so structured that it only makes them serfs for
life. Gunters desperately want to keep
IOI from winning the prize of controlling OASIS.
Among my favorite cultural references: We get an important plot item during one of
Wade’s early quests that involves details of the 1983 film WarGames with
Matthew Broderick, a film I really liked at the time. Among other film favorites of OASIS creator
James Halliday were the great teen films of John Hughes, as well as Blade
Runner (1982) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and many
others. (The 2018 film pretty much
ignores them.)
But I especially loved the book’s episode of Wade/Parzival’s quest
for the Second Gate, where he drew upon his knowledge of the music and the (Neil
Peart) lyrics of one of James Halliday’s all-time favorite Rock albums, the
1976 Rush album 2112. (This album
has also been a nominee for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Special Award). This is a crucial libertarian connection if
you know that album’s background.
(As an aside: In those mid-1970s,
I was a rambling radio music listener, only hearing random FM radio Rock tunes
while driving to and from solo climbing expeditions while toking on the holy
herb. So I never had time to collect any
Rock albums in those days or know much of the details about the era’s other
great musical groups or their lyrics, but I definitely liked what I was hearing
on the radio from Rush. I often stumbled
down from a climbing ordeal out of the mountains to my car at the roadhead, and
as I lit up and turned on the car radio I heard glorious Rock and Roll with blazing
guitars and heroic lyrics about liberty.
In those days, I had no idea of the extent of Rush lyricist Neal Peart’s
libertarian ideas, as I could rarely decipher many of the garbled words I was
hearing in Rush songs, but a few phrases and notions that strongly celebrated
freedom came through. And I liked the
band’s hard Rock sound. I was a big fan,
albeit not knowing much about them.)
Peart’s scenario in 2112 has a protagonist who in many
important ways is like the hero of the 1938 libertarian SF novella Anthem
(a Prometheus winner, in the Hall of Fame category). The Anthem hero offers his great scientific
re-discoveries to humanity only to be rejected and threatened with destruction
by an idiotic, conservative, theocratic bureaucracy. In the Rush album, the hero offers up his own
wondrous individualistic discovery of ecstatic soul-renewing music, via his own
re-discovery of the electric guitar, to an uncomprehending stupidly dark
priesthood. (This is a very strong
libertarian background connection in the Ready Player One novel, but
unfortunately all mention of this Rush album and its individualist ideas was
left out of Spielberg’s 2018 feature film except for just a too-brief glimpse
of a wall poster of 2112 in Halliday’s bedroom.)
The issue of Personal Privacy is very important in this book, as an
individual’s need for their own private space.
Wade’s secret “hideout” deep into the midst of a vast discarded junkyard
heap is his one place to interact in OASIS without interference from anyone. When he discovered it, early on, he
realized: “I’d found something of
immeasurable value: privacy.” He homesteaded his own private property. Privacy is crucial for the development, sanity
and flourishing of an individual. Later
in the story, after successfully winning important game quests and thus earning
vast virtual credits in the OASIS universe, Wade/Parzival buys his own personal
(virtual) asteroid and it gives him a precious personal kingdom of
privacy. Secure private property equals
safety. Later, before committing to his
most risky revolutionary strategy of probing into the very heart of the
tyrannical corporate entity, he first seeks to secure a niche of privacy within
which to operate.
Finally, Ogden “Og” Morrow is a peripheral character in the story
(played in the 2018 film by Simon Pegg).
He had co-founded OASIS with
James Halliday and was his best friend since youth. But Og quit the foundation running it in
2022, because he said OASIS had become “a self-imposed prison for humanity.” The book says that Og’s real-world mansion and
grounds in Oregon “looks exactly like Rivendell” (an episode also missing in
the film).
.
.
The movie of Ready Player One (2018) produced and directed by Steven
Spielberg
The Spielberg film is very different from the book in many details,
but much of the action is still captured.
The plot has been extensively reworked, even though Cline was a
co-writer, and most of the cultural references have been changed. It is a bit less dark than the novel, but it
is very much less implicitly libertarian. I still like it though I regret that many of
the best parts of the book are ignored.
It is well casted. The villain,
Nolan Sorrento (played by actor Ben Mendelsohn) looks exactly like David
Miscavige! Mark Rylance plays James
Halliday, and Simon Pegg plays Og. The
CGI is great, as it would have to be to depict the virtual reality universe
that is a major location of the story’s action.
The historical-cultural details referenced in the film are, like the
book, so deep and richly layered that I bet I will find much, much more of
interest by studying the DVD someday. E.g.,
on first viewing, I swear I had an extremely brief glimpse of an incidental
OASIS avatar depicting Beetlejuice (1988) in the crowd, etc.
The film has the potential to be a nerd classic on account of its
abundant (and often too-brief) references to past culture in films, books,
games, etc. The more one knows about the
culture of the 1970s, 80s, 90s and beyond, the more amazing the
experience. There is much information to
be mined. E.g., the film makes very good
reference to the Stanley Kubrick 1980 film adaptation of Steven King’s The
Shining.
In the end, I was most disappointed by the fact that the book’s use
of both the music and story of the album 2112 by Rush was left out. Unforgivable.
The movie was worth seeing.
Hey, it’s Spielberg! But
do check out the book.
-Zenwind.
.
