Read Ready Player One, Acclaimed Story About Online Worlds (Says Douglas Story)

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is an acclaimed novel that just released its paperback edition, and since it first came out, it's been recommended to me maybe several dozen times as the best novel about online worlds since, yes, Snowcrash. I'm resisting it until my own novel comes out, but the latest endorsement comes from the Second Life artist known as Douglas Story, and Story says it's the story for us:

"My Second Life friend Lydia Bracken (who in RL is a librarian at a community college) contacted me about two weeks ago and said, "Drop whatever you're doing and start reading this book!" I obediently followed her instructions, and am I glad I did." Here's why:

"Ready Player One is a wonderful combo of virtual world mayhem, geeky 80s references, and a nerdy love story. Don't expect deep cultural insights, just a rollicking good read. The virtual world that the book portrays is omnipresent in the dystopian world of 2044, and everybody worldwide logs into the metaverse to both play and work. You know, basically the future that we all thought Second Life would have back in 2006. Anyone who has ever played an MMO or driven an SL avatar around will be as spellbound as I was. So say I. It's being released in paperback June 5. Enjoy!"

Oh I will someday, someday. If you already have, dear reader, please share your story about the story alongside Story.

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Comments

[Mitch Wagner]

I'm reading it. A bit under halfway in. I'm enjoying it, but to tell the truth, I'm a little overwhelmed. It's kind of old-hat to someone familiar with SL.

[Tateru Nino]

Hands-down, the best novel I've ever read about virtual worlds is Wycliffe's Dark Siren. I'll see about getting this one on my reading list, though.

[Barbara Thomas]

I really loved this book (one of my best of 2011). I liked the 80s pop-culture/gaming references, the humour, and the pace of the narrative. Good immersive fiction (just like SL sometimes.)

On another note (more related to the impact of digitization than virtual worlds), it struck me as so odd that the paperback edition coming out still gets noticed. I read it on my Kindle last year and wonder how long that staggered launch of different paper formats can persist. Remember when publishers were trying to hold back eBook publication dates in the same way?

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Loved it.

This was so full of crunchy geek goodness that I wondered if the writer had taken a peek into those old cardboard boxes I keep stashed in the bottom of my closet (because, well, you never know when a wandering group of players is going to want you to DM "Queen of the Demonweb Pits" for them).

[allfrog]

liked it the first time when i read snowcrash and saw tron IN the actual 80s..

[Seymore Steamweaver]

I read this story sometime last year. It reads very quickly and is highly entertaining, but a bit hokey in places.

A good first novel, but also very blatantly a first novel. I look forward to his next book if he is motivated enough to produce one.

Also, in order for SL to get to the level that the virtual world in the book is at I really think they'd have to be acquired by a larger company with the resources and the talent to get it done correctly.

Call me crazy, but if Facebook launched a new feature tomorrow that could have its already signed up members talk to each other in a 3D chatroom and drive around in cars/spaceships/dinosaurs/slices of pizza and all the regular Crap you can do in SL, it would not only be more successful than SL (of FB's 900million+ users, they'd really only need 1% to use the service to need to be more popular than SL) If it would be based on any close to SL's own cloud based browser experiments it would far out perform the viewer based experience. I was one of the lucky ones asked to play around with the beta that LL had and it was to this day the best SL experience I've ever had. I didn't know SL could look that good.