Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

There’s a scene towards the end of Ready Player One where our heroes have gathered in a virtual chat room to discuss their plans to defeat the evil corporate army that has designs on conquering the whole world’s virtual reality when suddenly one of the OG creators of that very same virtual reality comes and stands in their midst Jesus-like – though the doors were encrypted for fear of the Sixers:

“No one else has the ability to eavesdrop on you. Especially not the Sixers. OASIS chat-room encryption protocols are rock solid. I assure you.”

Well now, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my brief brushes with the internet, it’s this: never trust a backdoor. It’s like that thing they say of invasive species: if you see one, you can bet there’s a hundred in the bush. And if one early programmer hacked in through a back door he built into the software, you can bet you’ve got a few more evesdroppers hanging round. But, don’t worry: nothing bad comes of it.

And that’s the thing with Ready Player One: the whole book is a lie. Cline wants you to believe that the 80s were a fabulous time – and they were: but not because of any objective measure, rather just that we were kids then – and that you can be a jaded, poverty-stricken loner who wins the world and gets the girl. It’s a child’s toy of a story. Maybe it’s fun if you think of it like that, but if you’re looking for something cyberpunk with which to spend your night you might want to look elsewhere.

Oh, it’s got all the cyberpunk trappings: virtual worlds, networked everything, corporate behemoths run amok, and densely-packed urban squalor, but Cline goes and ruins it by soaking, just absolutely drenching, everything in nostalgia. Look, I get it: the first video games you played, your first comics, Saturday morning cartoons – it’s all marvelous. But nostalgia isn’t cyberpunk.