Review of Ready Player One
Entering the world of Ernest Cline’s SF novel Ready Player One is like taking a trip back to the future, for this futuristic world has embraced a resurgence of 1980s pop culture due to a high-stakes contest that necessitates knowledge about the era. The 80s nerd in me – the one who obsessed over certain movies, music, and video games – felt a thrill each time Cline alluded to one of these iconic friends who journeyed with me through my youth. Today, people claim to be “geeks” and “nerds,” and those titles are largely celebrated; however, this was not always the case. During the 80s, it was deemed perfectly acceptable to obsess over sports trivia, spend hours watching football, and spend obscene amounts of money at the mall, but waste time and money in the arcade, plaster your bedroom walls with posters of bands whose entire catalog you know by heart, or try to build a robot in your spare time? Only loser nerds who needed to get a life would do...