Ryan

I want to start off by saying that I get why people would love this book, and there were a bunch of moments in it that were fun. I'm in the demographic that's the prime target for the book (“geeky dude that was alive in the 1980s”) and on a surface level it was a fun trip down memory lane.

Under the surface, though, the story becomes a little disappointing. The main character, Wade, seems really underdeveloped and unremarkable, with little personality beyond “good at videogames”. Despite being such a cypher, though, the other characters in the story idealize him. The villains are similarly shallow. The justification for them being villainous is originally “they're a corporation and try to play the game strategically”, but then they're suddenly murdering dozens of innocent people. The story would have been a lot stronger had its characters been more developed and more fully realized.

This continues with the way that Ready Player One relates to its main theme of nostalgia. Nostalgia – specifically early-to-mid-80s nostalgia for mainstream pop music, video games, and movies – permeates every aspect of the story and the characters' lives. On the surface this might seem fun, especially for the target audience of the book. The problem is, however, that it's a story in which nostalgia and culture have become corrupted. The characters aren't nostalgic for the reasons that people in real life become nostalgic for stuff – because they're wishing for a return to a more carefree time, or because of personal, emotional links to the material. Instead, they're nostalgic for the 80s, a culture that they never experienced or encountered, because Halliday was nostalgic for the 80s. The rich old man has warped society into this cargo cult that worships the trinkets of his youth to the disservice of all else. There's no evidence of any culture existing in the world of Ready Player One beyond 2002 – just slavish observance to the things that Halliday loved. Halliday has an absolutely abusive relationship to the culture of the OASIS, and it's unfortunate that the book doesn't make any attempt to critique or analyze that relationship.

Wright does a great job here of linking together some of the metaphyics of Buddhism (or, at least, Buddhism as it is practiced in the West) with non-Buddhist thought. At times he seems a little too focused in on his personal favourites within both of those categories (mindfulness meditation and evolutionary psychology, specifically), but as long as you view this more of a personal narrative than a textbook, it's a quite enjoyable look at those topics.

This was an interesting companion piece to Martin's abandoned Song of Ice and Fire series*. It's written from an in-universe perspective, chronicling the history of the earliest Targaryen rulers of Westeros. Written as a history book, it initially feels dry and lifeless, but as you get more engaged with it (and as Martin gets to the more interesting parts of Westerosi history), it becomes sometimes fascinating. On the whole, the Targaryens are a great argument against hereditary monarchy, and it's interesting to see the Westerosi narrator struggle to attempt to justify their failings and present them as beneficial parts of the development of his society.

Due to the scope of the material that Martin's going over, he unfortunately doesn't have space to include all the parts of the history that fans are most interested in - there's no Aegon the Unlikely or Rhaegar Targaryen here, which is a bit of a shame. On the other hand, he does include a comprehensive look at the Dance of Dragons that is epic in scale and rivals anything he's written in this world.

If you needed a model of why X-Men became so popular/relevant in the 1980s, this is it: not flashy art, or huge crossovers, or even super villains to fight. Instead, we have a strong, thoughtful piece of character work that looks at tolerance, group identification, and the changing political and cultural landscape of 1980s America, and how that would be reflected in a superhero setting.

What saddened me, re-reading this book for the first time in over a decade, is how relevant the whole thing still feels today. I mean, Rev. Stryker might have a youtube series rather than a cable channel, and he'd be hawking certain brands of fried chicken as a way to “stand up for traditional DNA”, but otherwise, it could be published today as a statement on tolerance in the 2010s with little alteration.