Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

I played squash recently with someone when I mentioned that I was reading David Gibbins’ Atlantis and they mentioned that I might enjoy Ready Player One. The movie had just come out and I was also told that it was wildly different from the book and that if I was going to watch the movie, I should read the book first. So I did.

The general premise is, this crazy genius, James Halliday, creates this thing called the Oasis which is a virtual universe that people log in to play games, do jobs, go to school and essentially do anything except for eat and sleep. It’s almost where computer games are heading now we have VR headsets, only expanded to cover more of our general livelihood.

In the book, the real world is going to shit with wars, poverty and famine. This is summed by the cover of the book which shows mobile homes stacked on top of each other to increase the population density and cater for the ever widening rich/poor divide.

Anyway, in terms of the driving force behind the story, Halliday dies and leaves no heirs so he starts a contest to find keys in his game world. Whoever finds all the keys gets full control of the Oasis – so essentially becomes the richest person in the world.

There were a couple things that irritated me about the movie, which I’ll throw in here as it’s relative but first, the book. Now in terms of story, Ready Player One is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It does that thing where it drags you in, gets you invested in the characters and makes it difficult to put down. The arrogance of the antagonist makes you want him to lose and the characters are both engaging and charming in their own ways.

That’s not to say it’s a well written masterpiece though. There are several issues I had which unfortunately broke the flow somewhat. In hindsight, I should have ignored them and carried on, but I can’t do that anymore.

The most glaring of these was the time-continuity throughout the book. At some point, weeks would go by in a sentence without any real clues toward the passage of time. Then time will move back three days, then forward a day to the point where it became impossible to know what day of the week it is. Maybe it’s got something to do with the destructive capability of computer games on our perception of reality, who knows. On the bare face of it though, it looks like bad writing.

Halliday is obsessed with 80s culture and a lot of the references in the book reflect this with games like PacMan, Tempest and Joust making prominent appearances. However, there are certain elements that cross over into the 90s. References to directors on page 62 that only really rose to prominence in the 90s and some didn’t make an impression until the 2000s. It seems like a strange choice when there were a lot of movies released during the 10 years that comprised the 80s. This is a minor point though and it annoyed me more in the movie when it states that James Halliday’s favourite game was Goldeneye, a game released in the mid nineties for a console that didn’t exist in the 80s!

I also found it odd that all Wade can do in the Oasis is go to school because he doesn’t have any money. It’s like EA came in, bought out the Oasis and then monetised the whole thing. I would have thought that especially for a character like Halliday, this would have been the exact opposite of how he wanted the Oasis to work, and it feels like part of the premise of the movie – stopping the evil protagonist from gaining control of the Oasis – is made almost redundant by this fact.

When I thought about it a bit more, it seems that Wade’s inability to go anywhere other than school in a universe of infinite possibilities, it merely a device to drive the story and it’s really weak when you think about it. The movie didn’t create this problem and doesn’t have Wade confined to school so while parts of the movie annoyed me, parts of it are better too.

Another example of things done to drive the story, when you get to page 208, Artefacts are brought up for the first time stating that they’ve been around since the start of the Oasis. This again feels very much like, ‘I need to do something to move the story on… so… Artefacts?’ It could have gone by unnoticed if done differently but it’s at the start of chapter, 208 pages into a 374-page book so feels like an afterthought. Not as bas as some of Stephen King’s Dark Tower decisions though, and there isn’t an author note to justify them either.

One more contrasting point from the movie is the character of Art3mis. A main part of the book is that Wade believes that the Art3mis avatar looks like her real-life counterpart – this is true in the book but in the movie, the avatar is an alien. I can see absolutely no reason for this. The movie also rushes through the premise of the Oasis making it so anyone who hasn’t read the book will struggle to know what’s going on. Lastly, there is no relationship building between Art3mis and Wade in the movie. He just sees her one day and the next thing you know they are best friends. It condenses the story from the book for no real gain or reason.

There – movie whine over.

As I said at the start, Ready Player One is an imaginative story with some great characters. It’s just a little rough around the edges.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was published by Arrow Books in 2012. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

David Gibbins - Crusader Gold

The second book in the Jack Howard series sees Mr Howard and friends on a quest to retrieve the Menorah, a golden Jewish relic lost to the ages. In a short sentence, it’s pretty much a copy of Atlantis in terms of the writing style and structure; there is lot of historic explanation, some crazy action sequences and a lot more plot explanation.

It suffers from the same ‘issues’ as the first book in that Jack is a walking Deus Ex Machina who knows the exact piece of information to continually drive the plot forward. That said, it’s still a good book that’s easy to read and has that ‘this could have happened in real life’ feel to it with its use of historical references.

In this case, it’s the ancient Viking Harald Hardrada who sacked Constantinople, stole the Menorah and sailed to Greenland and then on to America or, in this case, Newfoundland. Jack and company follow this trail while being pursued by some evil doers who are seeking the giant golden candlestick, not for historical purposes, but because it’s made of gold and worth a lot of money.

While telling its own story, Crusader Gold, appears to set the groundwork for some other group of people who will continually cross paths with Jack and try to kill him – adding excitement and exhilaration to their worldly travels.

There are two gripes I had with the story and one of the comes from the first book. Jack has unlimited resources at his disposal and while this is almost necessary for the course, it does feel rather convenient. It does make me wonder if there is going to be a future story where all his resources are stripped away – it might make some of his adventures slightly harder.

My other gripe was with the character Maria. She wasn’t mentioned in the first book at all, but is made out to be so close to Jack she’s practically his sister – which doesn’t make a lot of sense considering she was totally absent from the first book. If they were that close, you would have thought that Jack would have told her about a little thing like discovering Atlantis.

Crusader Gold clocks in at 449 pages but I reckon only 250 of those drive the story – the rest are spent explaining what’s going on and providing backstory to move the plot on to the next bit. There’s nothing wrong with that but at the same time, the balance just doesn’t feel right here.

Crusader Gold by David Gibbins was published by Headline Publishing Group in 2006. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)

David Gibbins - Atlantis

My new year’s resolution is to definitely read more and get more book reviews published. The first four reviews of this year date back to my holiday in June last year so it’s high time to crank up the output on book reading. Anyway, that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about David Gibbins’ first book, Atlantis.

There’s a semi-interesting story behind this one. I got a book called Gods of Atlantis from a charity book thing at work and after reading the opening and doing some research, I found out that it was the fourth or fifth book in a Jack Howard series. I didn’t like the idea of starting part way through a series, so I got Atlantis and the two follow up books to bridge the gap.

Atlantis follows the story of Jack Howard and his buddy Costas as they go in search of the legendary missing city. What follows is a tale of mystery and intrigue with a beautiful girl thrown into the mix. Naturally Mr Howard beds the girl, as it seems that all these sorts of books have to follow the same pattern of male, physically able protagonist has to bed the girl otherwise it’s not believable? I dunno.

One thing that came through the narrative a lot was Gibbins’ overwhelming need to explain everything. There are pages upon pages of exposition with literally zero urgency as characters will just spontaneously divulge every piece of information they know about the subject in question. Jack is easily the worst at this as he seems to know everything. I get that it’s a device to make the story work but it’s crazy how much he knows about everything and how there is seemingly time for everyone to stand around talking when there is a race against time to stop the bad guys destroying Atlantis.

The writing itself it actually very clean and well done and Gibbins structures his characters well. While I make fun of the fact that Jack Howard gets the girl in typical fashion, it’s at least structured in a way that makes it logical and there is a relationship development piece. This in comparison to Lee Child where the sex happens because the girl is hot.

In terms of things that stood out, there was one on page 352 that got my attention. The sentence talks about how there were low chances against surviving which on a read back, made me think it was saying there was a low chance of death… which I didn’t think was the intention of the sentence.

There was also a reference to ‘one giant step’ which made me cringe as it was a glaring similarity, and probably deliberate one, to the moonwalk. It just felt a bit out of place it a book that wasn’t at all cliché at this point.

There was one minor point when the quest for Atlantis starts by having a camel falling down a hole to uncover an Egyptian tomb. It’s described as a coincidence… I’m not sure how a camel falling in a hole and discovering a tomb is coincidence – more like blind luck. Which is not the same thing.

Atlantis is a solid adventure story and despite what I’ve said about the explaining, it’s necessary and helped me invest more in the story as you join the characters in their excitement of discovery. There is also a lot of action too, but it suffers from the same problem as other books where it’s 480 pages long and the last 40 pages are pretty much where everything happens.

Atlantis by David Gibbins was published by Headline in 2008. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)