Books - Ready Player One

The premise to this book had me conflicted. It's about a dystopian future (good) in which everybody interacts and plays inside a giant virtual world called the OASIS (good) where pretty much anything is possible. The catch is that the OASIS is littered with references to 80's geek culture (hmmm, I don't know). None the less, I was intrigued enough to check it out.

Ready Player One is Ernest Cline's first book. The story kicks off with the death of James Halliday, the creator of the OASIS, a Steve Jobs/Bill Gates type who had no heirs. Instead, his will is a contest, open to the whole world, for control of his fortune and, more importantly, the OASIS. We follow Wade/Parzival as he becomes a "gunter" or egg hunter, looking for the Easter egg of Halliday's fortune. Along the way, he makes friends and enemies, including an evil corporation who wants to control the OASIS for obvious reasons. There are good times to be had in this book, but I am not sure who it was written for, or why exactly.

The 80's references sometimes come on too strong to be believable for this to be 2044. Trends are cyclical, for sure, but when they come up again over the years, they are usually watered down and re-interpreted in the context of the current time. But the kids in Ready Player One could easily be pulled directly out of the 80's, since they know the references so well. There is a reason for that in the narrative, but it seems the author's nostalgia is the main driving force at times, particularly when the characters have to play through specific 80's movies inside the OASIS as part of their hunt for Halliday's egg. Those scenes play out like a narration of the movie, with little added in terms of the book's narrative. So on that level, it would seem that the intended audience would be people my age, who grew up in the 80's and get a kick out of the nostalgia porn. But then the book is written almost like a young adult novel, rather than something for an older crowd, and this might actually be on purpose. It's almost like it's written for that adolescent living inside us Gen Xers that never grew up. If that's the case, this might be a genius book. But for me, the last half of the book, where we get to see our heroes outside of the OASIS and the 80's references aren't as heavy, was the stronger part of the book.

All in all, I don't think this was meant as anything other than fun, so I can't seriously knock any of it. I'm notoriously predisposed to dislike nostalgia but I still had fun with this book for what it was, even if there were sections I felt could have been trimmed down somewhat or replaced by something else. It would be interesting to see if this book is popular enough to be turned into a movie, and it might actually work better visually, anyway.

Books - I Heart the Apocalypse

I don't know why it is, but I love stories about the end of civilization. The more grim, the better. It's why I love The Walking Dead. I recently read a couple of novels in this genre, one new, one not so new.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus is a surreal take on the apocalypse. In this book, a disease spread through language has made it nearly impossible for adults to communicate while children are immune. This has the feel of a bizarre David Cronenberg film. In the world of this book, Jews worship in secret in hidden huts in the forest. These huts cover a hole in the ground that connects to a strangely bio-electronic network radio system. It's very odd and also brought to mind elements of Jeff Noon's Vurt books. Overall, what resonated with me from this book was that sense of hopelessness that apocalyptic literature should have. In this case, the narrator is helpless to do anything for his wife, while his own daughter is basically killing them both with her language. By the end of the book, I'm not entirely sure the story holds together in a satisfying way. I can live with unanswered questions, but here, I think maybe some of the more bizarre elements needed a bit more clarity. Still, it was an entertaining read.

Last year, I saw the movie version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and found it was almost too much to bare. The sense of hopelessness in that movie is kind of overwhelming. Having read the book, now I think the movie pretty much nailed it. There's a dark side to parenting: that side where you consciously or unconsciously imagine the worst scenarios your child could end up in and what you would do to protect them. As a parent, you know you'd kill for your child. You know you'd give up your own life to save that of your child. But what if death was a certainty? What if there really was nothing left and the most humane thing you could do was to take your own child's life? That's the sense of impending doom that drives this story. The apocalypse in this scenario is not important, except to know that it happened and it wasn't pretty. What's left is even worse, as what remains of humanity, if you can even call it that anymore, has been reduced to horrific acts that go beyond mere survival. We follow a man and his son, traveling across what's left of the United States, trying to survive. There are moments in this book that are pure poetry. The structure, particularly the first half, is mainly imagistic vignettes, in short paragraphs. Some of them are not even events, but all of them convey the dread of this world. The language in this is amazing, with sentences that read like doom haikus. Overall, as grim as this story gets, and it gets about as grim as anything I've ever read, there is a small hope, tiny, really and nearly futile. Getting to that hope, though, is not easy. There were many passages in this book that had me near tears. This book will stay with me for a long time.