Ready Player One
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4.6 • 61 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
*THE BOOK BEHIND THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG*
'Wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, Ready Player One is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut' Independent
'Part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart' CNN
'Ernest Cline's novel deserves to be a modern classic' SciFiNow
'Gorgeously geeky, superbly entertaining, this really is a spectacularly successful debut' Daily Mail
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A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready?
It's the year 2044, and the real world has become an ugly place. We're out of oil. We've wrecked the climate. Famine, poverty, and disease are widespread.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed by the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate reality: OASIS founder James Halliday, who dies with no heir, has promised that control of the OASIS - and his massive fortune - will go to the person who can solve the riddles he has left scattered throughout his creation.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that the riddles are based in the culture of the late twentieth century. And then Wade stumbles onto the key to the first puzzle.
Suddenly, he finds himself pitted against thousands of competitors in a desperate race to claim the ultimate prize, a chase that soon takes on terrifying real-world dimensions - and that will leave both Wade and his world profoundly changed.
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Readers can't get enough of Ready Player One . . .
***** 'THAT WAS SO TOTALLY AWESOME, WOW!'
***** 'This is an exciting story, especially for geeks, and the key word is FUN.'
***** 'Ladies and gentlemen, from this day this book is my life and I will obsess over it constantly.'
***** 'I just kinda wanna cry right now. I'll have a proper review at some point, but I gotta let myself recover.'
***** 'I had the feeling while reading this book that it was written expressly for me. This is my childhood captured.'
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We found ourselves reliving our past alongside Ernest Cline’s main character, Wade Watts—a poor teen on a mission to dominate OASIS, the virtual world that’s home to millions of people in a dystopian 2044. Wade has dedicated his life to finding OASIS founder James Halliday’s Easter eggs, which are scattered around Wonka-style. While Ready Player One leans heavily on ‘70s and ‘80s pop culture references, it never tries to out-geek readers. Instead, we’re invited to join Cline in a clever homage to clunky consoles, cheesy movies and simpler days.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This adrenaline shot of uncut geekdom, a quest through a virtual world, is loaded with enough 1980s nostalgia to please even the most devoted John Hughes fans. In a bleak but easily imagined 2044, Wade Watts, an impoverished high school student who calls a vertically stacked trailer park home, lives primarily online, alongside billions of others, via a massive online game, OASIS, where players race to unravel the puzzles OASIS creator James Halliday built into the game before his death, with the winner taking control of the virtual world's parent company, as well as staggering wealth. When Wade stumbles on a clue, he's plunged into high-stakes conflict with a corporation dedicated to unraveling Halliday's riddles, which draw from Dungeons and Dragons, old Atari video games, the cinematic computer hacker ode War Games, and that wellspring of geek humor, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Of course.) The science fiction, video game, technology, and geeky musical references pile up quickly, sometimes a bit much so, but sweet, self-deprecating Wade, whose universe is an odd mix of the real past and the virtual present, is the perfect lovable/unlikely hero.
