10/10. This is my score.
Just once more it occurred to me that a book has abstracted and inmersed me so much in the story. It was twenty years ago, with Michael’s Ende Neverending Story, and this week happened to me with Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
Definitely it has a lot to do with the fact that it is a novel written for my generation, the generation of 70s and 80s who saw the emergence of the personal computer and video games, and still can remember with pleasure those happy childhood years that brought those great inventions.
Cline’s novel is not written to be dazzled by his careful prose. Not that, but it is not necessary to speak of a great literature to enjoy reading. Both Neverending Story and this book are written for teens, and therefore do not need to go to big words. It does not matter. What matters is the story told, and the fun it provides. And in that sense, the story of Ready Player One is perfectly basted with the successful dose of uncertainty and emotion to make you read nonstop.
Cline reaches perfection, in my opinion, on a subject on which all science fiction writers usually go over: the future.
Cline’s vision, thanks to his conservative position, transports us to a world of tomorrow more than plausible and leaves us amazed at the good ideas it raises. The Virtual Reality of Cline could not be more real and more achievable. The author himself has acknowledged it when seeing the great advances that have occurred in this field just after he published his novel, which has become in a prophetic announcement.
But Cline’s novel is not just science fiction. It’s all a tribute to an era and a generation, and is a very nice reflection on the implications of technology. How wil affect us the technology of synthetic worlds that is already starting to invade us? Where Humanity goes? Are we going back less real and more virtual? Will we loose reality against these cyber recreations? Cline, who is a great lover of video games and the time of their birth, at the end will leave us a good taste, rounding his story with a beautiful moral. The real world is what it is and will always be there, nothing will be removed. It is up to us to decide how we want to make it a better place. And Virtual Reality can help us or not. That is, like everything else, our thing.
Spanish version: Leyendo Ready Player One
Reflector of the Past 