Best Ever
Science Fiction?

Let’s get this out of the way: Ready Player One is not a great novel by any traditional literary measure. The prose is functional at best. The characters are types. The plot is a video game quest because it’s literally a video game quest. Critics savaged it for being a reference machine, a list of ’80s touchstones dressed up as a story. All of this is true. None of it explains why the book became a phenomenon, or why it matters.

Here’s what Cline understood: nostalgia is a drug, and he was willing to be the dealer. Wade Watts lives in a dystopian 2045, stacked trailer parks and environmental collapse, but he spends his life in the OASIS, a virtual world created by James Halliday, a Steve Jobs figure with the cultural obsessions of a 1980s teenager. When Halliday dies, he leaves his fortune to whoever can find the Easter egg hidden in his creation. The hunt requires encyclopedic knowledge of Halliday’s interests: Atari games, John Hughes movies, Rush albums, Dungeons & Dragons. Wade has spent years preparing.

The pleasure of the book is recognition. Cline drops references like depth charges — WarGames, Joust, Monty Python, Schoolhouse Rock — and readers either light up or tune out. There’s no middle ground. The critics who hated the book were mostly people who didn’t share the obsessions, who saw the references as empty signifiers rather than shared language. But for readers of a certain age and inclination, every callback landed like a message from a fellow traveler. Someone else remembered. Someone else cared.

This is both the book’s strength and its limitation. Ready Player One isn’t really about anything except itself — except the pleasure of cultural memory, the way certain artifacts become totems of identity. Wade doesn’t grow or change in meaningful ways. He just accumulates knowledge, solves puzzles, wins. The dystopian setting is window dressing; Cline isn’t interested in critiquing the conditions that created the OASIS. He’s interested in celebrating the escape it provides.

And yet. There’s something honest about that celebration, something the literary critics missed. Cline wasn’t pretending to write Infinite Jest. He was writing a fantasy for people who grew up feeling weird about the things they loved, who memorized dialogue from movies no one else watched, who found community in arcades and comic shops and early internet forums. The book says: those things mattered. Your obsessions weren’t wasted time. They were preparation for something.

The OASIS itself is the book’s most interesting idea, even if Cline doesn’t fully explore it. A virtual world where everyone escapes because the real world has failed — that’s dystopia, but it’s also Tuesday. We already live in the OASIS; we just call it the internet. Cline saw this in 2011, before the metaverse became a corporate buzzword, before we all spent a pandemic inside our screens. The book was prophecy disguised as nostalgia.

The film adaptation stripped out most of the specific references for rights reasons, but it also stripped out the loneliness — the sense that Wade’s obsessions are a response to abandonment, that the hunt matters because nothing else does. Spielberg made an adventure movie. Cline wrote something sadder: a book about people who have nothing except the things they love, and who discover that’s enough.

Is it great literature? No. Is it a novel that understood its moment, that gave a generation permission to value what they valued? Absolutely.

Ernest Cline: The Best Ever is nostalgia as survival strategy. Is Ready Player One the Best Ever Geek Culture Novel? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The hardcover first edition has become a collector’s item for the nostalgically inclined.
• The paperback is the accessible entry point — chunky and readable.
• Wil Wheaton’s audiobook narration is definitive — he gets the voice completely.