Book Review: "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline

In times of national economic upheaval the public seeks escapism. Some have credited Shirley Temple films with helping pull the nation's mood up out of the Great Depression. In this day and age we are no strangers to the economic chaos that surrounds us and the faceless corporations that seem to be gaining more and giving less. Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is strangely visionary in that it provides us with a foreboding future in which nearly all of humanity is destitute and starving. Their only escape is an immersive virtual world called the OASIS, but now even that is at risk of being taken over by a corporation that wants to make the OASIS exclusive and expensive.

The OASIS was developed by a brilliant billionaire with Asperger's by the name of James Halliday. Halliday invents the OASIS as a place where people can go and interact and learn under assumed identities using Avatars. The OASIS grows, spawning worlds full of games and challenges, but it also has its practical uses for business, news, and education. The most important thing to the protagonist of the story, Wade Watts, is that education in the simulated world is free. Not just free of cost, but free of bullies that made his real-life schooling experience a nightmare. 

What sets this story into motion is the death of James Halliday. For it us upon this fateful day that Halliday's avatar Anorak, announces to the world that he has arranged a contest open to everyone within the OASIS to uncover the Easter Egg that is the key to his fortune and power over the OASIS. Halliday programs three keys to three gates within the expansive universe of the OASIS, and he provides the public with the first clue to find the first key. And thus the race for the Egg begins.