Ready Player One - Ernest Cline - ★★★★.½

AUTHOR: Ernest Cline

SERIES: Ready Player One #1

GENRE: Science Fiction, LitRPG

PUBLICATION DATE: August 16, 2011.

RATING: 4.5 stars.

It's a rare occurrence in my life when I end up watching the movie without realising that it is a book adaptation. Now that I've read 'Ready Player One', I sure am glad that I watched the movie first! (Be forewarned; the movie story is very different from that of the book.)

Imagine reading a book on baseball and you happen to be interested in sports but aren't an expert in baseball. You'll enjoy the book, no doubt. But there will be many terms that you can't understand and at the end, there will be a slight regret in your heart. You will start pondering, "if only I had some interest in baseball, I'd have enjoyed this book even more." That's me with 'Ready Player One'.

'Ready Player One' is a full paisa-vasool entertainer. The story is set in a dystopian 2045, where the world is in tumult after the energy crisis and countless wars. The only escape people have is to log into a huge virtual reality world called OASIS that is a combination of video games plus real life skill enhancing options such as schools. The owner of OASIS passes away without an heir and declares in his final will that whoever can solve a three-level challenge can inherit the company and all his wealth. You can guess the rest. Every OASIS player wants to win this challenge. There are some baddies too who want to win the challenge for their own profit. (I am slightly reminded of the movie 'Avataar' while writing this, but the similarity is only limited to the extent that there is a virtual world and there are heinous corporations involved.)

The key OASIS players in the challenge are all interesting characters and each of them displays a range of human strengths and weaknesses. Ernest Cline keeps the momentum of the book steadily going with his tricky unveiling of the challenges, his mastery over the pop-culture content and his vivid imagination. Boy, does the man know his video games or what! 🤯

My experience of video games is limited to playing Mario, Prince of Persia, Pacman and a few other DOS based games in my teen years, that too sometimes. I was never a game freak. So for someone like me to read a book that is a full-fledged geek fest for video game aficionados was a huge challenge. I don't know most of the video games and movies mentioned in the book so many of the pop culture references were unfortunately a blank for me. In addition, I always tend to visualise a book while I'm reading it and this is next to impossible while reading a book where you don't know what it's talking about. That's where prior watching of the movie came in handy. I was able to picture at least a part of the VR action in my head. But these are my limitations and not those of the book. And yes, as almost always, the book is much better than the movie.

This book is perfect for a dystopian sci-fi thriller. Anyone who is looking for an enjoyable sci-fi thriller will be able to relish this book, especially so if you are a child of the 80s/90s as almost all the pop culture references are from that period. (Unless you are like me, of course: a horse wearing blinders when it comes to video games!)

For those who are more into my kind of pop culture, I'll remind you of a scene from Golmaal 3 (Did I just hear my reputation shatter?) where Ashwini Kalsekar's character talks in rapid English to the smitten non-English-speaking Vasoolibhai. When she finally asks, "samajh rahe hain na aap?", he responds, "Samajh mein to nahi aaya, magar sunke accha laga." Let me rephrase Vasoolibhai's reply for my feedback on 'Ready Player One': "Samajh mein zyaada nahi aaya, magar padhke accha laga!" 😛