“I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” - Unknown
Ready Player One, by Earnest Cline
I enjoyed this book with a big, dripping glass of iced sweet tea, because that's what I would drink as a kid in the 80's (when milk wasn't being forced on me.)
"It's tempting..." That's what would pop up in my mind throughout my reading of Cline's debut novel, Ready Player One, a science fiction and dystopian story of a future world in which lives both personal and professional are conducted in a simulated digital world while the real world falls apart from a decades-long energy crisis. Neighborhoods consist of stacks of trailer homes 9 to 10 units high, and travel between cities or states comes at a risk of being attacked by looters and thieves. But within the OASIS - Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation - you can look like anyone, go anywhere, be anything. Provided you have the money and have "leveled up" enough.
But it's tempting, this future of choosing the face you present to the world, where an education isn't limited by geography or funding or teacher availability. Where you can lose your "life" and just start over. And all you have to sacrifice to have this is human physical contact.
It's tempting because it's so possible.
You see us all bowed over our smart phones, we no longer talk to each other, conversations happen over text more than the phone. Lives are lived almost completely online where you can order your groceries and have them delivered to your door, buy clothes and games and movies and books and have them shipped to your door. You can communicate with someone in Russia or China without having to ever leave your recliner. And when life gets shitty, you can escape to the internet and become someone else, anyone else.
Immerse that not-so-future world in the nostalgia and seeming innocence of 80's pop culture and good guy vs. bad guy video game structure and you have Ready Player One where the heroes look little like their avatars, rarely see the sun, and are the closest of friends though they lives miles and miles apart.
I didn't read RP1, but rather listened to it, narrated by none other than sci-fi, 80s geek anti-hero, Whil Wheaton. Though not at all necessary to enjoy the book, I think it helped pull me into that world of Ladyhawke and Pac Man and shag carpeting. Despite the feeling of foreboding, a warning of "This road lay ahead!" RP1 is fun and exciting and pulls you into its multi-world mayhem until you are just as exciting and worked up as Parzival and Aeche and Art3mis, anticipating where the next gate will be, what the next challenge will be and who will be there to try to stop you.
That world of quests and grand prizes is a tempting one, but a fate I hope we humans never will know. I like the sun and sky too much.
