By Ernest Cline - Ready Player One: A Novel

My 15 yr old son watched the movie at Christmas and I found out it was originally a book. He loved it, better than the film - took him a week to read and he doesn't like reading normally, so really pleased.

Loved the film, but the book was awesome

If you’re an 80s kid, you’ll love this

This book is set in a post-oil world, only in 2045. The climate has shifted and American society is so horribly affected - as we learn, so are other nations - that people live in stacked trailers with a solar panel or two, or huddle homeless on city streets. The many people who choose to escape into online worlds are called the missing millions.This is cyberpunk, a sub genre of SF which says that as technology increases the living conditions become less desirable. Specifically, thanks to an early influencer novel Neuromancer, it is often inferred to be about people choosing to live life in online worlds because their real world life is miserable, impoverished or crowded.The 1980s enjoyed by a main character (he is dead at the outset but much of the backstory and plot involves his whims) permeates a new subculture as online dwellers in a cyber-world called the Oasis follow a treasure hunt. This is an American version of 1980s however with a token Monty Python film added near the end to make it seem more appealing to British readers. The 1980s were horrible, depressed, impoverished years and nobody here could afford all the game consoles and arcades the characters refer to, nor did most of us see the American tv series or cereals. UK / Irish music is not really present and so most of the references went over my head, nor would I have wanted to be bothered following up on them.Nothing but exposition and backstory happens for the first six chapters; I'd have had something happen. The entire world is not very bright, as the first clue immediately had me saying 'it must be on the school planet'. Some of the other clues would seem to be answered by a few moments of googling. Our impecunious hero Wade or Parzival (his avatar's name) could not possibly have done the many times overs of detailed reading, viewing, computer game playing, listening and note-taking in his 17 - 18 years as well as going to school and learning coding and hacking which he is apparently an expert at by the end. I say this as someone who was reading at the age of two. There just wasn't enough time, in my opinion.Deus ex machina, Wade stalking a girl who has told him to leave her alone - plus a serious shortage of women in any positions of power or trust - a one-sided bullying giant corporation (why only one? Why weren't several corporations plus the government in on the race?) and characters who don't grow or change, perhaps because of a lack of sub-plots. All reasons to dock stars, but I'm still giving it four stars because the story kept me reading and was quite entertaining. Anything that gets young people reading is good. No comparison to Snow Crash though.This is an unbiased review.