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Ernest Cline

Ready Player One Kindle Edition

by Ernest Cline (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Book 1 of 2: Ready Player One

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

“Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly

A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready?

In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days.

When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself.

Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club

“Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost

“An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN

“A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe

“Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR

“[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

Print length

386 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Ballantine Books
Publication date

August 16, 2011
File size

4165 KB
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Ready Player One

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Ernest Cline

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Ready Player Two: A Novel (Ready Player One Book 2)
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“No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful.”
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I’d come to see my rig for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn’t exist. Each component of my rig was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself.
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Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation was a big place.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The science-fiction writer John Scalzi has aptly referred to Ready Player One as a ‘nerdgasm’ [and] there can be no better one-word description of this ardent fantasy artifact about fantasy culture. . . . But Mr. Cline is able to incorporate his favorite toys and games into a perfectly accessible narrative.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“A fun, funny and fabulously entertaining first novel . . . This novel's large dose of 1980s trivia is a delight . . . [but] even readers who need Google to identify Commodore 64 or Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde, will enjoy this memorabilian feast.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Incredibly entertaining . . . Drawing on everything from Back to the Future to Roald Dahl to Neal Stephenson's groundbreaking Snow Crash, Cline has made Ready Player One a geek fantasia, '80s culture memoir and commentary on the future of online behavior all at once.”—Austin American-Statesman

“Ready Player One is the ultimate lottery ticket.”—New York Daily News

“This non-gamer loved every page of Ready Player One.”—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series

“A treasure for anyone already nostalgic for the late twentieth century. . . But it’s also a great read for anyone who likes a good book.”—Wired

“Gorgeously geeky, superbly entertaining, this really is a spectacularly successful debut.”—Daily Mail (UK)

“A gunshot of fun with a wicked sense of timing and a cast of characters that you're pumping your fist in the air with whenever they succeed. I haven't been this much on the edge of my seat for an ending in years.”—Chicago Reader

"A 'frakking' good read [featuring] incredible creative detail . . . I grinned at the sheer audacity of Cline's imagination.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Fascinating and imaginative . . . It’s non-stop action when gamers must navigate clever puzzles and outwit determined enemies in a virtual world in order to save a real one. Readers are in for a wild ride.”—Terry Brooks, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Shannara series

“I was blown away by this book. . . . A book of ideas, a potboiler, a game-within-a-novel, a serious science-fiction epic, a comic pop culture mash-up–call this novel what you will, but Ready Player One will defy every label you try to put on it. Here, finally, is this generation’s Neuromancer.”—Will Lavender, New York Times bestselling author of Dominance

“I really, really loved Ready Player One. . . . Cline expertly mines a copious vein of 1980s pop culture, catapulting the reader on a light-speed adventure in an advanced but backward-looking future.”—Daniel H. Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Robopocalypse

“A nerdgasm . . . imagine Dungeons and Dragons and an 80s video arcade made hot, sweet love, and their child was raised in Azeroth.”—John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of Old Man’s War

“Completely fricking awesome . . . This book pleased every geeky bone in my geeky body. I felt like it was written just for me.”—Patrick Rothfuss, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Wise Man’s Fear

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

0001

I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence.

Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by brushing up on a few coin-op classics. Galaga, Defender, Asteroids. These games were outdated digital dinosaurs that had become museum pieces long before I was born. But I was a gunter, so I didn’t think of them as quaint low-res antiques. To me, they were hallowed artifacts. Pillars of the pantheon. When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence.

I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer’s tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer. I wasn’t welcome in my aunt’s room across the hall, which was fine by me. I preferred to crash in the laundry room anyway. It was warm, it afforded me a limited amount of privacy, and the wireless reception wasn’t too bad. And, as an added bonus, the room smelled like liquid detergent and fabric softener. The rest of the trailer reeked of cat piss and abject poverty.

Most of the time I slept in my hideout. But the temperature had dropped below zero the past few nights, and as much as I hated staying at my aunt’s place, it still beat freezing to death.

A total of fifteen people lived in my aunt’s trailer. She slept in the smallest of its three bedrooms. The Depperts lived in the bedroom adjacent to her, and the Millers occupied the large master bedroom at the end of the hall. There were six of them, and they paid the largest share of the rent. Our trailer wasn’t as crowded as some of the other units in the stacks. It was a double-wide. Plenty of room for everybody.

I pulled out my laptop and powered it on. It was a bulky, heavy beast, almost ten years old. I’d found it in a Dumpster behind the abandoned strip mall across the highway. I’d been able to coax it back to life by replacing its system memory and reloading the stone-age operating system. The processor was slower than a sloth by current standards, but it was fine for my needs. The laptop served as my portable research library, video arcade, and home theater system. Its hard drive was filled with old books, movies, TV show episodes, song files, and nearly every videogame made in the twentieth century.

I booted up my emulator and selected Robotron: 2084, one of my all-time favorite games. I’d always loved its frenetic pace and brutal simplicity. Robotron was all about instinct and reflexes. Playing old videogames never failed to clear my mind and set me at ease. If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game’s two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It’s just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

I spent a few hours blasting through wave after wave of Brains, Spheroids, Quarks, and Hulks in my unending battle to Save the Last Human Family! But eventually my fingers started to cramp up and I began to lose my rhythm. When that happened at this level, things deteriorated quickly. I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: game over.

I shut down the emulator and began to browse through my video files. Over the past five years, I’d downloaded every single movie, TV show, and cartoon mentioned in Anorak’s Almanac. I still hadn’t watched all of them yet, of course. That would probably take decades.

I selected an episode of Family Ties, an ’80s sitcom about a middle-class family living in central Ohio. I’d downloaded the show because it had been one of Halliday’s favorites, and I figured there was a chance that some clue related to the Hunt might be hidden in one of the episodes. I’d become addicted to the show immediately, and had now watched all 180 episodes, multiple times. I never seemed to get tired of them.

Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).

My own home life had never even remotely resembled the one depicted in Family Ties, which was probably why I loved the show so much. I was the only child of two teenagers, both refugees who’d met in the stacks where I’d grown up. I don’t remember my father. When I was just a few months old, he was shot dead while looting a grocery store during a power blackout. The only thing I really knew about him was that he loved comic books. I’d found several old flash drives in a box of his things, containing complete runs of The Amazing Spider-Man, The X-Men, and Green Lantern. My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Wade Watts, because he thought it sounded like the secret identity of a superhero. Like Peter Parker or Clark Kent. Knowing that made me think he was must have been a cool guy, despite how he’d died.

My mother, Loretta, had raised me on her own. We’d lived in a small RV in another part of the stacks. She had two full-time OASIS jobs, one as a telemarketer, the other as an escort in an online brothel. She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn’t hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones. But the earplugs didn’t work very well, so I would watch old movies instead, with the volume turned way up.

I was introduced to the OASIS at an early age, because my mother used it as a virtual babysitter. As soon as I was old enough to wear a visor and a pair of haptic gloves, my mom helped me create my first OASIS avatar. Then she stuck me in a corner and went back to work, leaving me to explore an entirely new world, very different from the one I’d known up until then.

From that moment on, I was more or less raised by the OASIS’s interactive educational programs, which any kid could access for free. I spent a big chunk of my childhood hanging out in a virtual-reality simulation of Sesame Street, singing songs with friendly Muppets and playing interactive games that taught me how to walk, talk, add, subtract, read, write, and share. Once I’d mastered those skills, it didn’t take me long to discover that the OASIS was also the world’s biggest public library, where even a penniless kid like me had access to every book ever written, every song ever recorded, and every movie, television show, videogame, and piece of artwork ever created. The collected knowledge, art, and amusements of all human civilization were there, waiting for me. But gaining access to all of that information turned out to be something of a mixed blessing. Because that was when I found out the truth.

...

I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.

The worst thing about being a kid was that no one told me the truth about my situation. In fact, they did the exact opposite. And, of course, I believed them, because I was just a kid and I didn’t know any better. I mean, Christ, my brain hadn’t even grown to full size yet, so how could I be expected to know when the adults were bullshitting me?

So I swallowed all of the dark ages nonsense they fed me. Some time passed. I grew up a little, and I gradually began to figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to me about pretty much everything since the moment I emerged from my mother’s womb.

This was an alarming revelation.

It gave me trust issues later in life.

I started to figure out the ugly truth as soon as I began to explore the free OASIS libraries. The facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest. Artists and scientists and philosophers and poets, many of them long dead. As I read the words they’d left behind, I finally began to get a grip on the situation. My situation. Our situation. What most people referred to as “the human condition.”

It was not good news.

I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said:

“Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it later. But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling to one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

“Oh, and by the way . . . there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid. Deal with it.

“You’re probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a ‘global civilization.’ But, honestly, it wasn’t all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right?

“But that’s where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole bunch of energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it’s pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we’ve had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it’s been going on for a while now.

“Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

“Basically, kid, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. Things used to be awesome, but now they’re kinda terrifying. To be honest, the future doesn’t look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in ‘decline.’ Some people even say it’s ‘collapsing.’

“You’re probably wondering what’s going to happen to you. That’s easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You’re going to die. We all die. That’s just how it is.

“What happens when you die? Well, we’re not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You’re just dead, your brain stops working, and then you’re not around to ask annoying questions anymore. Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called ‘heaven’ where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There’s no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you’re going to die someday and disappear forever.

“Sorry.”

...

OK, on second thought, maybe honesty isn’t the best policy after all. Maybe it isn’t a good idea to tell a newly arrived human being that he’s been born into a world of chaos, pain, and poverty just in time to watch everything fall to pieces. I discovered all of that gradually over several years, and it still made me feel like jumping off a bridge.

Luckily, I had access to the OASIS, which was like having an escape hatch into a better reality. The OASIS kept me sane. It was my playground and my preschool, a magical place where anything was possible.

The OASIS is the setting of all my happiest childhood memories. When my mom didn’t have to work, we would log in at the same time and play games or go on interactive storybook adventures together. She used to have to force me to log out every night, because I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked.

I never blamed my mom for the way things were. She was a victim of fate and cruel circumstance, like everyone else. Her generation had it the hardest. She’d been born into a world of plenty, then had to watch it all slowly vanish. More than anything, I remember feeling sorry for her. She was depressed all the time, and taking drugs seemed to be the only thing she truly enjoyed. Of course, they were what eventually killed her. When I was eleven years old, she shot a bad batch of something into her arm and died on our ratty fold-out sofa bed while listening to music on an old mp3 player I’d repaired and given to her the previous Christmas. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Ernest Cline is a #1 New York Times bestselling novelist, screenwriter, father, and full-time geek. He is the author of the novels Ready Player One and Armada and co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. His books have been published in over fifty countries and have spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestsellers list. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011:Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of other world-wide citizens, Wade dreams of finding three keys left behind by James Halliday, the now-deceased creator of OASIS and the richest man to have ever lived. The keys are rumored to be hidden inside OASIS, and whoever finds them will inherit Halliday’s fortune. But Halliday has not made it easy. And there are real dangers in this virtual world. Stuffed to the gills with action, puzzles, nerdy romance, and 80s nostalgia, this high energy cyber-quest will make geeks everywhere feel like they were separated at birth from author Ernest Cline.--Chris Schluep

Guest Reviewer: Daniel H. Wilson on Ready Player One by Earnest Cline
Daniel H. Wilson is the New York Times best-selling author ofRobopocalypse.

I dare you not to fall in love with Ready Player One. And I mean head over heels in love--the way you fall for someone who is smart, feisty, and who can effortlessly finish your favorite movie lines, music lyrics, or literature quotes before they come out of your mouth.

Ready Player One expertly mines a copious vein of 1980s pop culture, catapulting the reader on a light-speed adventure in an advanced but backward-looking future.

The story is set in a near-term future in which the new, new form of the Internet is a realistic virtual multi-verse called the OASIS. Most human interaction takes place via goggles and gloves in millions of unique worlds, including the boring (and free) “public education” world from which our teenage protagonist must escape.

Our unlikely hero is an overweight trailer park kid who goes by Wade Watts in real life, and “Parzival” to his best friends and mortal enemies--all of whom he interacts with virtually. Just like the Arthurian knight that is his namesake, young Wade is on a quest for an incredible treasure guarded by mythical creatures. Specifically, the creator of the OASIS and richest man on the planet, James Halliday, stipulated in his will that his fortune be given to the first person who can find an “Easter egg” hidden somewhere in the OASIS. The catch? Every devilishly complex clue on this treasure hunt is rooted in an intimate knowledge of 1980s pop culture.

This leaves the people of the future hilariously obsessed with every aspect of the 1980s. The setup is particularly brilliant, because Ernie Cline seems to have a laser-beam knowledge of (and warm, fuzzy love for) every pop song, arcade game, and giant robot produced in the last thirty years. Seriously, this is a guy who owns and regularly drives a 1982 DeLorean that has been mocked up to look exactly like the time-traveling car in Back to the Future, complete with a glowing flux capacitor.

But Ready Player One isn’t just a fanboy’s wet dream. Real villains are lurking, threatening our hero with death in their ruthless hunt for the treasure. Worse, these corporate baddies are posers with no love for the game – they have movie dialogue piped in via radio earpieces, use bots to cheat at arcade games like JOUST, and don’t hesitate to terrorize or murder people in the real world to achieve their aims inside the OASIS.

As the book climaxes, a mega-battle unfolds with sobering life-or-death stakes, yet soldiered entirely by exciting and downright fun pop-culture icons. The bad guys are piloting a ferocious Mechagodzilla. Our good guy has to leave his X-Wing fighter aboard his private flotilla so that he can pilot an authentic Ultraman recreation. And how do you not grin when someone dons a pair of virtual Chuck Taylor All Stars that bestow the power of flight?

Cline is fearless and he lets his imagination soar, yet this pop scenery could easily come off as so much fluff. Instead, Cline keeps the stakes high throughout, and the epic treasure hunt structure (complete with an evolving high-score list) keeps the action intense. The plot unfolds with constant acceleration, never slowing down or sagging in the middle, to create a thrilling ride with a fulfilling ending.

Best of all, the book captures the aura of the manifold worlds it depicts. If Ready Player One were a living room, it would be wood-panelled. If it were shoes, it would be high-tops. And if it were a song, well, it would have to be Eye of the Tiger.

I really, really loved it.

-- Daniel H. Wilson

Questions for Ernest Cline, Author of Ready Player One

Q) So it seems you’re a bit of a pop-culture buff. In your debut novel Ready Player One you incorporate literally hundreds of pop culture references, many of them in ways that are integral to the book’s plot. What’s the first thing you remember geeking out over?

A)Sesame Street and the Muppets. I thought Jim Henson ruled the universe. I even thought it was pretty cool that I shared my first name with a muppet. Until the first day of kindergarten, when I quickly learned that "Ernie" was not a cool name to have. That was about the time I segued into my next childhood obsession, Star Wars.

Q) Like the book’s hero, you possess a horrifyingly deep knowledge of a terrifyingly broad swathe of culture, ranging from John Hughes movies to super-obscure Japanese animation to 8-bit videogames to science-fiction and fantasy literature to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. What the heck is wrong with you?! How do you have so much time on your hands?

A) Well, I’m raising a toddler now, so I don’t have as much time to geek out as I used to. I think I amassed a lot of that knowledge during my youth. Like most geeks, I was a sponge for all kinds of movies, TV shows, cartoons, and video games. Then as an adult, I worked at a long series of low paying tech support jobs that allowed me to surf the Internet all day, and I spent a lot of my cubicle time looking up obscure pop culture minutiae from my childhood while I waited for people to reboot their PCs. Of course, I spent most of my off hours geeking out, too. Luckily, all those hours can now be classified as "research" for my novel.

Q) You’re stranded on an island and you can only take one movie with you. What is it?

A) Easy! The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. (Can I take all of the DVD Extras and Making of Documentaries, too?)

Q) You’re given free tickets and back stage passes to one concert (artist can be living or dead)- who is it and why?

A) Are we talking about time travel back to a specific concert in the past here? Because it would be pretty cool to stand on the roof of Apple Records and watch the Beatles jam up there. But my favorite rock band that’s still together is RUSH, and I just bought tickets to see them this June!

Q) Favorite book of all time.

A) That’s an impossible question! I could maybe give you three favorites: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Q) Best failed TV show pilot available on Youtube?

A) The unaired Batgirl pilot starring Yvonne Craig.

Q) Favorite episode of Cowboy Bebop?

A) “Ganymede Elegy.” Or maybe “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui.”

Q) What’s the first arcade game you ever played? What’s your favorite?

A) I was deflowered by Space Invaders. My all time favorite coin-op game was probably Black Tiger.

Q) Your idea of the perfect day...

A) Play Black Tiger. Then go see Big Trouble in Little China at the Alamo Drafthouse with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter doing a live Q&A afterwards. When I get home that night, I accidentally invent a cheap abundant clean energy source that saves human civilization. I celebrate by staying up late to watch old Ultraman episodes with my daughter (who loves Ultraman even more than I do).

Q) True or False. We hear you own a DeLorean and that you plan on tricking it out to be a time-travelling, Ghostbusting, Knight-Rider car.

A) False. I actually plan on tricking it out to be a time-traveling Ghostbusting Knight Riding Jet Car. It’s going to have both a Flux Capacitor and an Oscillation Overthruster in it, so that my Delorean can travel through time AND solid matter. My personalized plates are ECTO88, just like a DeLorean that appears in my book.

(I’m so glad that you asked this question, because now I can justify buying the car as a "promotional tool" for my book. Everyone reading this is a witness! My DeLorean is helping me promote my book! The fact that I’ve wanted one since I was ten years old is totally irrelevant!)

Q) Speaking of DeLoreans: biggest plot hole in the Back to The Future Films?

A) The Back to The Future Trilogy is perfect and contains no plot holes! Except for the plot hole inherent in nearly all time travel films: The planet Earth is moving through space at an immense speed at all times. So if you travel back in time, you are traveling to a time when the Earth was in a different location, and you and your time machine would appear somewhere out in deep space. For a time machine to be useful, it also needs to be able to teleport you to wherever the Earth was/is at your destination time.

Q) But there are two DeLoreans in 1885--why doesn’t Doc dig out the one he buried in a cave for Marty to find in 1955 and use the gasoline from it to get the other DeLorean up to 88mph?

A) Doc would have drained the gas tank before he stored a car for 80 years, so there wouldn’t have been any gas. And tampering with the DeLorean in the cave at all could conceivably create a universe-ending paradox, because it has to be in the cave for Marty to get back to 1885 in the first place. Totally not a plot hole!

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004J4WKUQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; 1st edition (August 16, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 16, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4165 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 386 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0307887448
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #10,950 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Computers & Internet Humor
- #26 in Humorous Science Fiction (Books)
- #45 in Time Travel Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

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Ernest Cline

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ERNEST CLINE is an internationally best-selling novelist, screenwriter, father, and full-time geek. He is the author of the novels Ready Player One and Armada and co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg. His books have been published in over fifty countries and have spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games.

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Paul Weber

Really bad

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2019

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Excruciating. I don't understand how there appeared to be no one who edited this book. Some issues:
1. The first 17% of the book (kindle says how far along you are) is pure exposition of the world. That's one sixth of the book where nothing happens except our hero attends two classes in his nonsensical virtual high school.
2. There is a chapter where the characters sit around and tell each other what's already happened in the book. Why?!! I've already read it, why are the characters explaining it to each other.
3. The insanely over explained pop culture stuff. Example "oh wow that looks like Rivendell!" "Yes it does! Rivendell, from the Lord of the Rings movies!" I'm surprised the author doesn't break the fourth wall and just scream "GET IT?!"
4. The swearing. The multi page treatise on the virtues of masturbation (Lord I wish I were kidding.) I'm not a prude and am all for profanity when it is natural and adds to the emotion of the story. Here it just feels like a 13 year old who just learned to swear and does it to feel grown up.

I skimmed the entire second half and am much happier for it. The only joy I got from this book is reading the one star reviews so I could agree with all of them.

200 people found this helpful

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Tony R.L.

Love/Hate This

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2018

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I got this after seeing the movie and hearing from a few friends about how different the book is. My two main points after reading this book in 3 days:

1. Love the 80's pop culture references integrated into the story. No book I've ever read has ever gone this deep into 80's game, movie, TV, music references. The writer is obviously a true 80's fanatic and geek. No doubt about that, this guy has lived it and did his homework.

2. The main character is completely unlikable. He never arcs or changes, even at the end (finding 'love' is not a character change). Honestly, I've never read a book where the main character is just a complete and utter unlikeable character even to the end. You never really want this jerk to succeed. His inner workings and thoughts are as just about as bad as the main villain.

Conclusion-
Steven Spielberg did a brilliant job taking the meat of this story and actually making the primarily character LIKEABLE because the writer was just down right horrible at it. If the filmmakers had followed the book, no doubt it wouldn't have been successful. I did enjoy the 80's references, but too bad the main character was unlikable.

179 people found this helpful

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Evan

Reads like it was written by a high-school student

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2018

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Reads like it was written by a high-school student. And to the people that think that's because it's POV: ALL of his writing is like that. Everything that the protagonist needs to happen, happens fine and everything works out because he is the chosen one of some rich nerd's world. It's the worst kind of wish fulfillment. I hate the term Mary-Sue but that's what this book is about.

126 people found this helpful

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Slow, agonizing... and trite

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2018

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I can hardly understand the allure of this novel. Or how it managed to gain such popularity. Feels like its written for a fourteen year old, which is in such contrast to the age group who would either understand or have experienced anything that happens in this book... those of us in our late thirties, early forties. It read like a list of games and game explanations, with zero character development. I never finished... because I really didn't care about any of the characters in the book or what the outcome would be. I often found myself nodding off, chapter after chapter. It's a poor write... and a poorer read.

157 people found this helpful

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Robert Cole

Wonderful Story Line With Way Too Much Exposition

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2018

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I really like the story line and the idea. I had to read through to find out how the characters figure it all out. I have a soft spot for virtual worlds - I met my wife online the virtual world called Second Life. I enjoyed how the virtual world is described and all of the technology in this book is within reach (except maybe the huge bandwidth to feed the world to that many people - but it will come with time).

So why only three stars? Ernest Cline writes really well, with one issue - the incredible amount of exposition. At least once every chapter, I found myself saying, "Enough already, get on with it." Sure some of it is from my growing up in the eighties and EC explaining parts of the decade *in detail*, but not all. There is a lot of explanation of the main character's life and how he got where he is. You don't find out things a little at a time - there are multi-page explanations. The book could easily have been half the length - or could include more from the virtual world. I did enjoy the imagination of the author in the building of the worlds (after seeing the amazing variety of user created content in existing virtual worlds).

So, I would have to say - very good book to read, but you can skip a lot of the exposition (or skim it so you don't miss something).

53 people found this helpful

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Two Bears

Bought Kindle Version and returned it.

Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2019

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This books sucks and blows!

I had high hopes this would be like SnowCrash Neal Stephenson, or Daemon or Freedom by Daniel Suarez it’s ANYTHING BUT!

Hits you with the following before the story starts

Evolution
Climate change
No God
Barely get food to eat but fast internet for RPG
Trailers set on top of each other in stacks
Set in Oklahoma (Tornado Alley)

Story may be ok but can’t suspend that much disbelief.

44 people found this helpful

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Ben

This book is awful

Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2017

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It's nothing but an attempt to pass every single 80's nerd reference there is through the digestive tract of a cow, and fling the resultant mess at your brain. There's no character development, no sensitivity - nothing to make you think. It's just a non-stop breathless race to cram in as much nostalgia as possible.

Look, I get it - I'm a nerd - I really am. I'm the kid that always wanted to grow up to be a Systems Analyst. I grew up on many of the references in this book. But being a nerd doesn't have to mean you give up an appreciation for good writing. You want clever, entertaining future dystopia? Go read Snow Crash.

120 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Ally A

I loved this book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 27, 2016

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I loved this book! As a woman in her 40s, I'm definitely not the target market for this. It’s a young adult book, and scifi, both of which I don’t usually read. However, as a bit of a gamer geek and an 80s nut, this was recommended to me by friends, and I’m so glad I read it – it was just brilliant!

It’s set in a dystopian future in 2044 – oil has run out, the climate is a wreck, and most people escape reality by spending their lives inside an immense virtual reality video game called the OASIS (similar to Second Life, if you’ve ever played it). It has its own currency, and kids even go to school inside the game. The creator of the game, James Halliday, died years earlier, without an heir to his immense empire, but left a video will with clues/easter eggs to be tracked in the game. Whoever solves these will inherit the OASIS, and the immense wealth that goes with it, and it’s an international obsession. Halliday was a teenager in the 80s and remained fixated with the era, so this means that everyone who is trying to solve the puzzle is just as fanatical, leading to some wonderful references. Wade Watts, our protagonist, is one of the millions trying to crack this. He’s a teenager, stony broke, living with his aunt, and at the bottom of the OASIS food chain. Through a combination of luck and skill with 80s arcade games, Wade somehow manages to be the first solve the first clue, and that’s when everything changes.

I’m not going to give you any spoilers, but I can’t recommend this highly enough. Great characters, very nasty baddies, loaded with 80s references, and actually worryingly possible – it’s definitely worth a read. Oh, and Steven Spielberg bought the film rights – the movie will be released in 2018. I hope he does it justice.

72 people found this helpful

Sci-Fi Kingdom

I wouldn’t waste your time on this book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2019

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The premise seemed interesting and I really wanted to like this, but it was just so dull, boring, extremely long-winded and a bit hard to believe. There’s no way a teenager or someone in their early 20s could watch every 80s TV show, film, and animation, as well as read practically every book in existence – multiple times – and remember every single tiny minute detail of them all. While also repeatedly playing every 80s videogame ever created, and having the lyrics to loads of 80s songs memorised. I know this is fiction, but it still needs to be believable. I wouldn’t waste your time on this book. Basically a textbook full of pointless 80s entertainment references.

11 people found this helpful

Steve Gardiner

Ready... Steady... Go!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 18, 2017

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I surprised myself by really loving this - I'm not really one of the target audience - I was in my thirties in the 1980s, and though I got a lot of the references, quite a few went right over my head. But that didn't really matter; Ernest Cline's enthusiasm for the decade shines through, and the plot is a real rollercoaster. You can see why Spielberg is directing and co-producing the film; it feeds into his inner child and fit well with his SF canon.

Having read some of the critical reviews of the book, I think they're missing the point - they compare it (often very unfavourably) with other, more highbrow authors' works. This isn't a highbrow book, it's simply a highly entertaining and imaginative romp, and on those terms it succeeds fully. I'm looking forward to further books by Cline. I'm waiting for his announced sequel Ready Player Two, and I've already downloaded Armada.

13 people found this helpful

John D. Payne

Good but not great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 23, 2018

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The concept of this book is much more exciting than the writing of it, unfortunately, which is probably what Spielberg saw in it when he made the movie (which bears only a passing resemblance to its source material). I think the main problem is that the author knows more about playing video games than crafting a good story. I got bored of his descriptions of the main character Wade playing games in the OAsIs. I'm a casual gamer myself, but I'm not sure there's any way of describing the playing of Pac-Man that doesn't make people want to skip a few paragraphs ahead. The story of the treasure hunt is mildly amusing, but the fact that it's all told in past tense doesn't really do it any favours. I would've liked to have seen more of the outside world as well which he briefly described earlier on. In fact, nearer the end we do get to see more of it, and this was my favourite part of the story. I thought that maybe things would improve as the stakes were raised, but it all becomes a bit too safe again. In the movie, there's a great scene in which Wade is in the OAsIs whilst also in the back of a moving van. This makes for great tension and juxtaposition, but in the book (SLiGHT SPOILER) he's safely tucked away in a secure house. There are some exciting moments in there somewhere, but they don't seem to have any great effect on the main character, he just carries on with the hunt. The authors knowledge of eighties movies and video games is admirable to a point, but it doesn't really make for a great read, although I did make it to the end, so maybe I saw a smidgen of potential in the debut author's scribblings. Good luck to him.

12 people found this helpful

lindsayemma

This is a brilliant book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 31, 2018

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Can I just say that this book is absolutely brilliant!
So very clever, fascinating, funny, enthralling - I didn't want it to end!
I read the book after watching the film - this is the way to go- the book fills in so many details and you do not mind that the story has so many differences because you know that the book came first and the film obviously had a great deal of limitations the book did not.
Read this book it is excellent!
I loved it!