Okay. I am going to put most of this post under a cut, less because of spoilers (because frankly if you've seen the movie trailer or read literally anything about this book, you already know what's important plot-wise), and more because this is gonna be more of a rant than a post. So uh, if you love this book or aren't interested in reading a bunch of paragraphs that basically start with an unsaid AND ANOTHER THING, you probably shouldn't click. Otherwise, WELCOME.
Honestly I barely even know where to START. The basic overview of this book is that there's this teenage boy named Wade, and he lives in post-apocalyptic America circa 2040 that's in the middle of an energy crisis and so lots of poor people live outside of the cities in vertical stacks of trailer homes, and there's no work and it's somehow both twenty years in the future and the problematic climate is that it's too COLD instead of too HOT, and whatever. It's bad. He lives with his aunt and a whole bunch of other terrible relatives who don't matter, which is good because they'll be dead within five chapters, and his parents were good while they were alive but died like seven years before the book started.
But that's just his terrible Actual Life. His REAL life, the one that matters, the one that everyone on the planet actually prioritizes, is the VIRTUAL life in the massive online video game utopia OASIS created by James Halliday, a dude who was born in 1972 and then changed the entire world with this game he created. Wade goes to school in the OASIS and games in the OASIS and his friends are in the OASIS and, if you hadn't guessed from its very subtle name, it exists as a haven from the terribleness of actual reality and Wade wants to spend all of his time there because who wouldn't.
This becomes even more true when Halliday dies and instead of making a will like a normal person or becoming a cyborg like an actually INTERESTING multi-billionaire genius might do in the future, he creates an Easter egg hunt game in the OASIS with some riddles that people have to solve in order to defeat the bad boss and it's all based on his personal interests and obsessions which were all various kinds of geek culture from the 1980's. And years pass and no one figures out the riddles but Wade has spent ALL OF HIS LIFE consuming all of the media that Halliday loved best from forty years before Wade was even born, so it turns out that Wade is the Chosen One, etc. So he goes through the OASIS and he beats the first level out of three and then the Real Life Bad Guys who are also trying to beat the game to gain access to Halliday's hundred billion dollar fortune attack him in Real Life. But he manages to keep going through the help of The Girl who's ALSO very good at this game (but not quite as good as Wade!) and also his virtual Best Friend Who Might Have A Secret, and he moves to Ohio at one point for Reasons and then sells himself into a debtor's prison more or less in order to gain access to the Real Life Bad Guys' servers and expose their badness to the world and then they discover that the true lesson of the game is that they can't solve it alone, Wade and The Girl and BFWMHAS and The Japanese Kid all have to work TOGETHER until of course the other three all die virtually and then Wade solves it alone and wins all the money and kisses The Girl and THE END.
Oh my god it is so boring.
So much of the book is simply a recitation of facts. It's a book that has no appreciation for the fact that ESPECIALLY in the smartphone era, having an encyclopedic level of knowledge about a thing isn't actually that impressive, since we can just google information. Memorizing episodes of Family Ties is way less of a party trick (...to the extent that it ever was one) now that we can literally just find out what happened on episode six of season three any time we want to because of wikipedia. And listen, I watch speed runners on twitch. I understand that watching someone else play video games can legitimately be fun. But reading the description of someone else play those video games in a novel where the outcome of the game is never in doubt is not actually fun. There's no suspense, at all. Wade is never going to die, and he's also never not going to win, either--this book was never going to end with The Girl or BFWMHAS winning the game instead. He can be the benevolent and good friend who SPLITS the winnings with them after he wins. But he was always going to be the Special Bestest Gamer who most understood the obsessions of Halliday, because in this book the only way you win is by knowing the most, and fundamentally that means that you can't prioritize sharing. None of this book is about sharing. It's only about telling and showing off how much random information this character who, again, was born in 2022 knows about fucking Family Ties.
BRIEF TANGENT: So one of the big points of this book is Wade telling the reader about all of the media that he's consumed. He's seen this movie X number of times and that entire television series all the way through Y number of times, and he's read all of these books and listened to and memorized all of those albums and of course he mastered all of Halliday's favorite video games. The number of different pieces of media he references knowing well is MASSIVE, and his acquisition of all of this knowledge is basically handwaved by the claim that when you can do this for twelve hours a day every day, that's a lot of time. But the character is only eighteen, and he only started studying all of this nonsense in earnest when he was thirteen or fourteen in order to beat the game after Halliday died, so like I am PRETTY SURE it's actually impossible for him to have had the TIME to have consumed anywhere close to all of this stuff. I didn't start crunching the numbers, but I bet if someone DID there would be no way for it to have happened unless he was actually Neo in The Matrix learning kung fu (a much much MUCH better version of essentially the same story). Even if you assume that the character is lying to the reader when he says that he saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail 37 times or whatever, it is still NOT CREDIBLE and while that isn't the MOST egregious piece of bad world building in this book it's the one that bothered me the most, for reasons that are connected to my next point, which is:
The puzzles are bad.
I understand the appeal of an insane Easter egg hunt. Every year I spend a long weekend solving incredibly complex puzzles on a team of forty people just for fun. The moment of realizing that you are uniquely qualified to solve a puzzle because of your personal obsessions with X piece of media is a high like little else, genuinely. But the puzzles in the book are bad. They're bad both because they're not actually challenging enough and so I question the intelligence of EVERYONE on earth, and also because there is literally no way for the reader to help solve them along with Wade. We don't have the information we would need to be able to figure out the mystery, which is just about the worst kind of mystery novel. It's not just that the book doesn't value sharing among its characters; it also has no interest in sharing with the reader, beyond the ability to simply recognize all of the various media that Wade knows.
This is especially problematic because so much of the intended charm of the book is in that shared nostalgia. It's supposed to be fun to swim through all of these cultural references from the 1980's and to remember loving them or whatever, because that's what Halliday did by building this shrine to his adolescence. But it makes NO SENSE for Wade or any other character to love that media the way that Halliday did. This isn't because the youth of one generation can't become obsessed with the pop culture of a prior generation; kids at Panic! at the Disco concerts know all of the words to Africa by Toto, and Friends is still watched by people who hadn't been born when its first season was on air. But the only reasons Wade and everyone else in the world care about the entire geek culture of the 1980's is because Halliday was obsessed with it and they're REQUIRED TO LEARN IT in order to have a shot at winning this lottery of billions of dollars because every other aspect of life on earth is in ruins. That's not culture! That's not loving something! That's not a GENUINE INTEREST in any of this, that's an ASSIGNMENT. And it ties into what is probably the biggest problem with the entire premise of the book, which is that Halliday is Not Good.
Halliday is this brilliant programmer who created this game that took over all of humanity and earned him billions and billions of dollars, and instead of actually doing something good with all of that money, he created a fucking GAME WITHIN A GAME to choose his heir after his death while the entire planet was consumed by an energy crisis and climate disasters and wars and famine. There is nothing likable about this. There is nothing cool or interesting in this dead guy deciding to force anyone who wants a way out of the stacks to learn about everything that he loved best when he was a teenager as a means of determining who most deserves his fortune. Fuck that. And this idea that Wade REALLY DESERVES IT because he actually does truly love what Halliday loved is completely beside the point, because the entire concept is immoral. I kept waiting for the reveal that Halliday was actually evil, because fundamentally he so clearly is, but instead he was just a Snape who loved a girl who didn't love him back and his lesson from beyond is simply 'go out and live life like I didn't' which like buddy MAYBE that would be POSSIBLE if you had ever given a shit about anyone else on this planet.
I can appreciate that this book probably wouldn't have angered me so much if I had read it back in 2011, back before everything in OUR reality felt like it was being systematically destroyed by old white dude billionaires who don't care about anything other than themselves, and I actually think it might be fun at least as a movie, because there are ways to make the quests he needs to win compelling on screen. And I understand the appeal of a book where a stand-in for the presumed reader is the only one who can beat the big boss of the video game and all that. It's also a book that tries, on a surface level, not to be terrible in the expected racist and sexist and homophobic ways: the girl character is better than Wade at some things, and isn't Conventionally Beautiful, and BFWMHAS turns out to be a black lesbian rather than the white dude avatar she plays in OASIS, so the final four of them are two boys and two girls and two of them are white and two of them aren't and one of them isn't straight so look at this diversity! And I'm sure that those characters made some white dude readers of this book mad or uncomfortable, and for that alone I'm glad they were in there. But none of their personal experiences and identities matter at all, in part because the only thing that made Wade care about them was that they all loved the media consumed and revered by this white dude who was born in 1972. It's good that girls are portrayed as also liking games and being able to play them and so forth. But that's nowhere close to being enough.
Finally, as almost a side note, the writing is childishly bad. My god.
So yeah. In case you had any doubt, don't read this book.
Grade: D
Honestly I barely even know where to START. The basic overview of this book is that there's this teenage boy named Wade, and he lives in post-apocalyptic America circa 2040 that's in the middle of an energy crisis and so lots of poor people live outside of the cities in vertical stacks of trailer homes, and there's no work and it's somehow both twenty years in the future and the problematic climate is that it's too COLD instead of too HOT, and whatever. It's bad. He lives with his aunt and a whole bunch of other terrible relatives who don't matter, which is good because they'll be dead within five chapters, and his parents were good while they were alive but died like seven years before the book started.
But that's just his terrible Actual Life. His REAL life, the one that matters, the one that everyone on the planet actually prioritizes, is the VIRTUAL life in the massive online video game utopia OASIS created by James Halliday, a dude who was born in 1972 and then changed the entire world with this game he created. Wade goes to school in the OASIS and games in the OASIS and his friends are in the OASIS and, if you hadn't guessed from its very subtle name, it exists as a haven from the terribleness of actual reality and Wade wants to spend all of his time there because who wouldn't.
This becomes even more true when Halliday dies and instead of making a will like a normal person or becoming a cyborg like an actually INTERESTING multi-billionaire genius might do in the future, he creates an Easter egg hunt game in the OASIS with some riddles that people have to solve in order to defeat the bad boss and it's all based on his personal interests and obsessions which were all various kinds of geek culture from the 1980's. And years pass and no one figures out the riddles but Wade has spent ALL OF HIS LIFE consuming all of the media that Halliday loved best from forty years before Wade was even born, so it turns out that Wade is the Chosen One, etc. So he goes through the OASIS and he beats the first level out of three and then the Real Life Bad Guys who are also trying to beat the game to gain access to Halliday's hundred billion dollar fortune attack him in Real Life. But he manages to keep going through the help of The Girl who's ALSO very good at this game (but not quite as good as Wade!) and also his virtual Best Friend Who Might Have A Secret, and he moves to Ohio at one point for Reasons and then sells himself into a debtor's prison more or less in order to gain access to the Real Life Bad Guys' servers and expose their badness to the world and then they discover that the true lesson of the game is that they can't solve it alone, Wade and The Girl and BFWMHAS and The Japanese Kid all have to work TOGETHER until of course the other three all die virtually and then Wade solves it alone and wins all the money and kisses The Girl and THE END.
Oh my god it is so boring.
So much of the book is simply a recitation of facts. It's a book that has no appreciation for the fact that ESPECIALLY in the smartphone era, having an encyclopedic level of knowledge about a thing isn't actually that impressive, since we can just google information. Memorizing episodes of Family Ties is way less of a party trick (...to the extent that it ever was one) now that we can literally just find out what happened on episode six of season three any time we want to because of wikipedia. And listen, I watch speed runners on twitch. I understand that watching someone else play video games can legitimately be fun. But reading the description of someone else play those video games in a novel where the outcome of the game is never in doubt is not actually fun. There's no suspense, at all. Wade is never going to die, and he's also never not going to win, either--this book was never going to end with The Girl or BFWMHAS winning the game instead. He can be the benevolent and good friend who SPLITS the winnings with them after he wins. But he was always going to be the Special Bestest Gamer who most understood the obsessions of Halliday, because in this book the only way you win is by knowing the most, and fundamentally that means that you can't prioritize sharing. None of this book is about sharing. It's only about telling and showing off how much random information this character who, again, was born in 2022 knows about fucking Family Ties.
BRIEF TANGENT: So one of the big points of this book is Wade telling the reader about all of the media that he's consumed. He's seen this movie X number of times and that entire television series all the way through Y number of times, and he's read all of these books and listened to and memorized all of those albums and of course he mastered all of Halliday's favorite video games. The number of different pieces of media he references knowing well is MASSIVE, and his acquisition of all of this knowledge is basically handwaved by the claim that when you can do this for twelve hours a day every day, that's a lot of time. But the character is only eighteen, and he only started studying all of this nonsense in earnest when he was thirteen or fourteen in order to beat the game after Halliday died, so like I am PRETTY SURE it's actually impossible for him to have had the TIME to have consumed anywhere close to all of this stuff. I didn't start crunching the numbers, but I bet if someone DID there would be no way for it to have happened unless he was actually Neo in The Matrix learning kung fu (a much much MUCH better version of essentially the same story). Even if you assume that the character is lying to the reader when he says that he saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail 37 times or whatever, it is still NOT CREDIBLE and while that isn't the MOST egregious piece of bad world building in this book it's the one that bothered me the most, for reasons that are connected to my next point, which is:
The puzzles are bad.
I understand the appeal of an insane Easter egg hunt. Every year I spend a long weekend solving incredibly complex puzzles on a team of forty people just for fun. The moment of realizing that you are uniquely qualified to solve a puzzle because of your personal obsessions with X piece of media is a high like little else, genuinely. But the puzzles in the book are bad. They're bad both because they're not actually challenging enough and so I question the intelligence of EVERYONE on earth, and also because there is literally no way for the reader to help solve them along with Wade. We don't have the information we would need to be able to figure out the mystery, which is just about the worst kind of mystery novel. It's not just that the book doesn't value sharing among its characters; it also has no interest in sharing with the reader, beyond the ability to simply recognize all of the various media that Wade knows.
This is especially problematic because so much of the intended charm of the book is in that shared nostalgia. It's supposed to be fun to swim through all of these cultural references from the 1980's and to remember loving them or whatever, because that's what Halliday did by building this shrine to his adolescence. But it makes NO SENSE for Wade or any other character to love that media the way that Halliday did. This isn't because the youth of one generation can't become obsessed with the pop culture of a prior generation; kids at Panic! at the Disco concerts know all of the words to Africa by Toto, and Friends is still watched by people who hadn't been born when its first season was on air. But the only reasons Wade and everyone else in the world care about the entire geek culture of the 1980's is because Halliday was obsessed with it and they're REQUIRED TO LEARN IT in order to have a shot at winning this lottery of billions of dollars because every other aspect of life on earth is in ruins. That's not culture! That's not loving something! That's not a GENUINE INTEREST in any of this, that's an ASSIGNMENT. And it ties into what is probably the biggest problem with the entire premise of the book, which is that Halliday is Not Good.
Halliday is this brilliant programmer who created this game that took over all of humanity and earned him billions and billions of dollars, and instead of actually doing something good with all of that money, he created a fucking GAME WITHIN A GAME to choose his heir after his death while the entire planet was consumed by an energy crisis and climate disasters and wars and famine. There is nothing likable about this. There is nothing cool or interesting in this dead guy deciding to force anyone who wants a way out of the stacks to learn about everything that he loved best when he was a teenager as a means of determining who most deserves his fortune. Fuck that. And this idea that Wade REALLY DESERVES IT because he actually does truly love what Halliday loved is completely beside the point, because the entire concept is immoral. I kept waiting for the reveal that Halliday was actually evil, because fundamentally he so clearly is, but instead he was just a Snape who loved a girl who didn't love him back and his lesson from beyond is simply 'go out and live life like I didn't' which like buddy MAYBE that would be POSSIBLE if you had ever given a shit about anyone else on this planet.
I can appreciate that this book probably wouldn't have angered me so much if I had read it back in 2011, back before everything in OUR reality felt like it was being systematically destroyed by old white dude billionaires who don't care about anything other than themselves, and I actually think it might be fun at least as a movie, because there are ways to make the quests he needs to win compelling on screen. And I understand the appeal of a book where a stand-in for the presumed reader is the only one who can beat the big boss of the video game and all that. It's also a book that tries, on a surface level, not to be terrible in the expected racist and sexist and homophobic ways: the girl character is better than Wade at some things, and isn't Conventionally Beautiful, and BFWMHAS turns out to be a black lesbian rather than the white dude avatar she plays in OASIS, so the final four of them are two boys and two girls and two of them are white and two of them aren't and one of them isn't straight so look at this diversity! And I'm sure that those characters made some white dude readers of this book mad or uncomfortable, and for that alone I'm glad they were in there. But none of their personal experiences and identities matter at all, in part because the only thing that made Wade care about them was that they all loved the media consumed and revered by this white dude who was born in 1972. It's good that girls are portrayed as also liking games and being able to play them and so forth. But that's nowhere close to being enough.
Finally, as almost a side note, the writing is childishly bad. My god.
So yeah. In case you had any doubt, don't read this book.
Grade: D
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