Initial Thoughts on Ready Player One

I'm only about 50 pages (4 chapters) in to Ready Player One, but I already have lots of thoughts about it.

I'm mostly enjoying it so far. The introduction and first chapter completely hooked me. I'm excited to see where this goes and how it plays out. The premise is lots of fun. The world is richly detailed. It's an apocalyptic future I can really see happening.

But the writing is clunky. Once the second chapter hits the plot basically stops so Cline can give the reader an extended info dump about this world he's created. Rather than revealing details subtly through action and dialogue, he just lays it all out. More than once I wanted to reach through the pages to remind him that the joke isn't funny if you have to explain it.

I liked the detail that Wade Watts' dad named him that because alliterative names reminded him of superhero alter egos. It was a great way to round out a character we never meet, breathe some life into him. And I thought Wade's avatar handle, Parzival, was clever. But then Cline spent a page explaining Percival's part in the Grail Quest and I felt my eyes glazing over. A well-read reader will get the reference. An intelligent reader with a spark of curiosity will look it up. Someone who doesn't care simply won't care. The author doesn't need to spoon-feed his readers like this.

Maybe it's just because I'm used to authors who expect a bit more from their readers. I just finished Dune which is a rich and subtle book. I'm nearly finished with my third or fourth read-through of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and I'm still catching new references. I like authors who drop these things in their books as easter eggs for their readers. It makes reading more fun.

But Cline has to point out and explain all of his references. Even though one of the characters actually says "I mean, did you ever hear of Wikipedia? It's free", he doesn't trust the reader to get the hint. And I can't be the only person who now reads books with my phone close at hand so I can Google words I don't understand or references that sound half familiar.

Of course, all of this sort of makes sense with the narrator he's created. Wade is very much an 18 year old boy, with the vocabulary and ego to match. So maybe this can be written off as character building rather than world-building. But even then, he shouldn't have to break down acronyms like XPs and MMOs. Every character in the book should know what these are, given the setting. And any reader who doesn't know probably has no business reading a book about a video game that has more or less taken over the world.

I also don't need to be told how to pronounce Art3mis; that requires only the most passing knowledge of leetspeak. You don't even need to know what it's called to work out that the 3 is standing in for the letter e. And  the pronunciation of Aech ought to have been clear from Wade's penchant for calling the guy names like Harry, Henry, and Humperdinck.

This is getting ranty. I do like the book. I'm just frustrated by its lack of subtlety. But then certain passages make up for it. The argument Wade and Aech get in to about Star Wars and whether or not Ladyhawke is a worthwhile movie was a lot of fun to read. Even though I hadn't heard of Ladyhawke, I was able to figure out what I needed to know from context. I just wish Cline trusted the reader a little more to figure these things out for themself.