Welcome to The House of Unpopular Opinions, in which I attempt to alienate all of my longtime readers, many of whom I consider good pals.
It's not that
Ready Player One won't make a decent enough movie when Steven Spielberg supposedly brings it to the big screen in the next couple of years. I think it will be a visual spectacle of a movie, and I'll pay good money to see it. It's just that when
The Hunger Games feels like deep, societal commentary and introspection in comparison to your book, I kind of wonder what I'm reading.
The story:
Wade Owen Watts is a kid living in "the stacks", a sort of slum comprised of towers of mobile homes erected tens of stories high outside of Oklahoma City. He's grown up poor in a near-future America dealing with an energy crisis of crippling proportions, and a state that's given over significant power to corporate interests right up to the point of re-starting indentured servitude in place of debtors prisons.
Almost everyone in America, and, indeed, on Earth, uses the OASIS, a virtual reality gaming system that has grown to undreamed of proportions and become a way of life. While the world falls apart around them, humanity wears visors and haptic gloves (and suits, and immerses themselves in full rigs) to role-play their lives in the OASIS in whatever setting they like, moving between worlds created and custom built, largely around 20th Century ideals of science fiction and fantasy.
The creator of the OASIS - a cult figure that's part Steve Jobs, part Bill Gates, part Gary Gygax, part John Hughes, part Howard Hughes - has passed. His obsessions with the ephemera of the late 70's - early 90's, the period of James Halliday's own youth, are integral to the OASIS. In the wake of his passing, a contest is announced - whomever can find three keys hidden on the OASIS and find the final "Easter Egg", will become heir to Halliday's interest in his company and rule the OASIS. The trick being, one must become utterly familiar with 1980's pop-culture, and more specifically, geek pop culture, in order to complete the quest.
This creates a subculture of users, Egg Hunter/ Gunters, who seek the egg, as well as nefarious, well-funded corporate types who set up a virtual army in order t capture the prize and basically own the internet. All are consumed with 1980's pop-culture, an artifact now 60 years out of date but extremely well-documented and a source of never ending fascination and compulsive study by the Gunters.
Got all that?
