Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

[MattD]

(Okay, I haven't read it, but now I will, but...) Ready Player One does sound a bit underwhelming, and Leviathan Wakes I largely liked, but in a 'that made time pass mostly unboringly' sort of way. Theres really no impressive recent SF? (Gods War, Quantum Thief and Anathem all seem to be 2010.) come on, there must be something....

God's War is a 2011 book (and Anathem actually came out way back in 2008; Quantum Thief was 2010 in the UK, 2011 in USA).

I thought Embassytown was impressive, albeit something of a throwback--but a more interesting throwback than the Quantum Thief, at least. In terms of 2011 SF books I haven't yet read, Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 looks like it could be impressive--if nothing else, it has an impressive page count. I've heard nothing but good things about Jane Rogers's The Testament of Jessie Lamb, as an impressive accomplishment in POV. Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men sounds interesting, as does Joan Slonczewski's The Highest Frontier. And yes, Infidel.

The biggest problem I'm having with this year is that so many of the potentially interesting 2011 SF books are dystopias--to the above add Utopia, The Fat Years, Soft Apocalypse, etc.--but there's only so many of those I can stand, and I've read enough already that I seldom find them precisely impressive.

And, maybe this will just be a year without much that impresses. It happens some years.

[Procrastimancer]

I suppose that I appreciate Leviathan Wakes a bit more than others because I consider it a good example of genre blending done well. For that reason alone, I would likely place it over the other SF books that I have read this year, but it helps that the book was tightly plotted and featured good characterization (for the primary characters, at least).

I go against the grain for some of the other popular titles of this year. I found The Quantum Thief quite ambitious and had it been longer, if there were more details added and time spent with the two main characters, it could have been great. However, as it stands, the book was firmly mediocre and considering the praise and hype, something of a disappointment. It was an excellent example of magic as technology, though. Embassytown was a decent book, but the distance of the narrator from the action and the quick wrap of the end events left me underwhelmed.

[Stego]

This year is, by far, the most impressive year in speculative fiction in the past 5 or more years. You folks are insane!

A Dance With Dragons

Wise Man's Fear

Ready Player One

The Night Circus

The Heroes

Leviathan Wakes

The Dragon's Path

When She Woke

The Last Werewolf

A Discovery of Witches

Embassytown

Reamde

Still need to read Children of The Sky

And for Hugo purposes, add The Quantum Thief.

[jdiddyesquire]

This year is, by far, the most impressive year in speculative fiction in the past 5 or more years. You folks are insane!

A Dance With Dragons

Wise Man's Fear

Ready Player One

The Night Circus

The Heroes

Leviathan Wakes

The Dragon's Path

When She Woke

The Last Werewolf

A Discovery of Witches

Embassytown

Reamde

Still need to read Children of The Sky

And for Hugo purposes, add The Quantum Thief.

I agree. I think it's a tremendous year. Especially with the number of great debuts. Huge year for debuts.

[MattD]

FWIW, I understood the above conversation to be specifically about impressive science fiction, and not including fantasy--where yeah, it's been a pretty good year.

[Datepalm]

I meant SF, fwiw. If I had to pick the most impressive book i'd read this year, it would probably be The Heroes. (with ADWD and maybe Mechanique in the running for seconds. I need to re-read ADWD properly though.)

[Procrastimancer]

I was also only referring to Science Fiction. There have been several great Spec Fic releases this year.

[Larry.]

I think the best "spec fic" releases have come from those sources not generally considered to be "spec fic" around these parts :P

[Datepalm]

Getting this thread back on track...

Read RPO. Found it...sad. Part of it is obviously that i'm not quite of the right age/geography to grok the nostalgia (I've never played an arcade game and i've never watched a John Hughes movie.) But part of it the way the nostalgic landscape itself is recalled. I mean, it's depressing! It seems like a frankly grim recreation of a kind of depressed, collapse of industry America, not some rose tinted friendly aw-shucks small town. Endless expanses (literally endless, at one point in the simulation, which I thought was an interesting image) of dingy arcade/pizza joints filled with kids playing repetetive games for hours, dodging their abusive parents...

Meanwhile, the OASIS itself is not held up as all that great - a tool, not an escape - and the real world of the book is both objectively depressing AND functions like a computer game, both in it's landscapes (I think the Stacks are actually explicitly compared to video-game topography) and in the way the plot functions in it, with the IOI part, solving layers of puzzles and moving through mazes and acquiring stuff and so on. Its weird. Not bad, I enjoyed it, but I seem to be a on a completely different wavelength to everyone who read it as a kind of feel-good, big-grin, happy book.

[john]

But you're easily familiar with the word "grok" which dates from the sixties. :P

I think it depends on your world view. If you're fond of western ideals and the american way you're going to be fond of Ready Player One because it celebrates the 80s pop culture that epitomises all that.

I thought the genuine affection for that stuff was the redeeming factor in the book. Otherwise it's just stuff piled on stuff with frequent info dumps and quick-fix hacking solutions to all the plot obstructions.

[Datepalm]

I think it depends on your world view. If you're fond of western ideals and the american way you're going to be fond of Ready Player One because it celebrates the 80s pop culture that epitomises all that.

I don't see it. How does the 80's epitomize 'the american way'?. The 50s, or some idealized 50's, at least, I could see - but we're talking the 80's. Big hair, new wave, MTV, D&D, destruction of the working class,Raeganomics, etc.

[john]

yeah, how's any of that not the american way? It was the time of wealth, excess, style, progress, materialism. With enough hard work and determination even a New York Dancer could become Madonna. So much better than what those commies had going for them.

[aidan]

I think 'Americana' is the word you two are searching for.

[john]

True, when I think of americana, Pac-Man is the first thing that comes to mind.

[megs]

I was very surprised at how much I liked Ready Player One. In the first 50 pages, I started a list of all the references that I had never seen/was not familiar with, but when it filled the page, I just gave up. And that really wasn't the point--even though only movie heavily referenced that I'd actually seen was War Games (well, and Star Wars), I still managed to enjoy it, which says a lot I think about the quality of the narrative and that it was able to stand on its own outside of the references. Though, even if I haven't played a video game, I do work in tech which probably did help with "getting" that side of things.

[Michael Charles Duncan]

I absolutely loved this book. Ready Player One was my favorite read of 2011. I believe the future in this book was tied to the 80's for many reasons. For one the author was a Geek who grew up in the 80's so write what you know works very well here. But even story purposes I felt it really fit. The creator of Oasis was a huge 80's buff cause that's when he grew up and it translated into the elements of Oasis. I didn't get the feeling that the "world" was all about the 80's, but instead the people in Oasis trying to solve the mystery and get ahold of all that money. The main character grabbed on to it because it shows him a time when the world wasn't messed up.

Having an addiction to the internet and gaming this book was like a wet dream for me. It had great elements of nostalgia but it was also heavy on idea's for future "gaming." I loved the online school element, private chat, and hooking in and becoming your character. I loved how your online character leveled up and also if you had money in the real world you could level up your Oasis equipment. In most novels they use the messed up world as the main hub and use gimmicks as an escape, but here the messed up world is only a back drop and most of the story, world building, and fleshing out characters happens in Oasis.

One of the few novels I have read in my lifetime that I couldn't think of a thing I would change about it.

If you need any other reason to read this the author is driving around the country in a delorian promoting this book.

[williamjm]

I finished it a couple of days ago. I thought it was quite good, it was an entertaining read although it had too many flaws to be a great book. Some of the characterisation was a bit simplistic - particularly the cliched antagonists - the story was predictable and there were a few plot holes. I think the biggest problem with the plot was that the egg hunt didn't seem to be as hard as it was portrayed to be, particularly obtaining the first key - it may not have been easy (although the meaning of the "much to learn" clue was glaringly obvious), but it wasn't hard enough that millions of people would have spent five years failing to find it. I think the setting was probably the best bit of the book, and the author did a good job of incorporating all the myriad references without having them get in the way of the plot too much, although arguably he could have spent more time explaining why the things being referenced were so great that they had such appeal decades later.

Read RPO. Found it...sad. Part of it is obviously that i'm not quite of the right age/geography to grok the nostalgia (I've never played an arcade game and i've never watched a John Hughes movie.) But part of it the way the nostalgic landscape itself is recalled. I mean, it's depressing! It seems like a frankly grim recreation of a kind of depressed, collapse of industry America, not some rose tinted friendly aw-shucks small town. Endless expanses (literally endless, at one point in the simulation, which I thought was an interesting image) of dingy arcade/pizza joints filled with kids playing repetetive games for hours, dodging their abusive parents...

Its weird. Not bad, I enjoyed it, but I seem to be a on a completely different wavelength to everyone who read it as a kind of feel-good, big-grin, happy book.

I'm not sure your reaction is really all that different to what the author intended. I agree that there is something tragic about the nostalgia, particulary the way that is enforced nostalgia where many people are devouring everything about the 80s because it could mean they win a prize rather than because they want to (although most of the successful gunters do acquire a genuine love for the 80s), and there's also something tragic about the implication that nothing worthwhile had really been created after the invention of OASIS. That said, I'm not surprised it is perceived as a feel-good book, take away the setting and it is a fairly standard good-triumphs-over-evil story where the young protagonist overcomes hardship to triumph and become successful and also becomes a better person in the process.

[Datepalm]

I think the biggest problem with the plot was that the egg hunt didn't seem to be as hard as it was portrayed to be,

This bugged me too, thematically as well as logically. Not only is it not a hard quest, its not an interesting one either. A quest is supposed to consist of, well, cool, adventurous character building stuff - arduous treks up forbidding mountains, deadly duels with worthy enemies, daring rescues of attractive women, that sort of business. Here they just...geek out some more. Not only, imo, is the actual contents of the quest objectively boring (I think the, erm, quarter dropped when he played pacman for 6 hours or whatever it was. Thats awful) but they're not new to the characters.

They win at questing by doing the stuff they already know how to do. I could be a questing adventurer too, if beating evil involved debating them to death on the subject of representations of women in 21st century science fiction novels. The point being, goodness, I wouldn't want to. Doing more of more or less enjoyable things you already know how to do with perfect confidence is not an adventure. Last time I checked, I think it was called "A Hobby" or, in a worse scenario, "Employment".

[Happy Ent]

They win at questing by doing the stuff they already know how to do.

(I do find your criticism reasonable, Datepalm, but allow me to defend RP1 anyway.)

The point is that we as readers, get to belatedly rationalise our obsessions. Yes, we already know how to rack up a shitload of points in Pacman or have memorised the entire script of Holy Grail. Now we can fantasize about how this enormous investment of time and intellectual resources can actually help us get rich and save the world. (Also, get the girl. The book would have been better if the girl had been hot.)

Until now, all we had was this Gary Larson cartoon: http://www.it8bit.com/post/13493676648/far-side .

[Datepalm]

Now we can fantasize about how this enormous investment of time and intellectual resources can actually help us get rich and save the world.

But thats really, really...dull. I understand the desire for affirmation, but to me that would seem to lie in the idea that people who can rack up a million points in pacman or recite the entire script of movies - expressions of mundanity - find that they can also do something else that is cool. I'd get it if someone's lifelong devotion to memorizing every single line in the Thundercats turned to have developed exactly the skills - say, an amazing memory - needed to rescue the princess from some particularly pedantic feline obessed Evil WIzards. This I understand as wish-fulfilment - This is Ender, or Randy from Cryptonomicon - the geek fantasy of one's odd hobbies and general personality turning out to actually hold the key to something totally awesome. You really are more than you seem - at the end of the day, you've climbed the mountains and rescued the girls and so on.

But RP1, by tuning thingsso finely, ends up completely undercutting it. Your special geek skillz of gaming and pacman are good for...more gaming and pacman! At the end of the day, all you do is still the mundane inanity of daily life. I don't mean this to be a criticism of geekery in particular, I think this is the heart of all personal-growth tpoe narratives, no? Someone starts out as ordinary, and then goes on to do the extraordinary - they're tested, they find out what they're really made of, etc. This holds for everyone from Daenerys to Bilbo. Only it doesn't hold for Wade - he starts out ordinary and goes on to do more of the ordinary. Thats just depressing.