i love bad literature so much. i love when someone has the confidence to write a novel but none of the talent or skill to back it up. i cant get to sleep tonight so im finally diving into Ready Player One and it's like... actively painful. it's clumsy and awkward and completely up its own ass. but i'd be lying if i said i wasn't having a good time!!
and this isn't a "so bad it's good" thing either, this is slop. this is less than slop. i'm on chapter 4 and i already fucking hate it. i love how i hate it. it makes me feel like i could get back into writing because i know i can do better than this. Ernest Cline is a hack. i have so much to learn from him
this is fucking exhausting. this is transcendent. i am absolutely miserable. i'm having the time of my life
It's so wretched in part I think because it has the seeds of something really clever. If the author had even the slightest modicum of self-awareness, all of this absolute slop could have been recontextualized into a genuinely amazing bit of satire.
I mean, just think about the world this book takes place in. A world so unjust, so vile, so wretched and inhospitable to humanity due to how badly the rich have fucked the entire globe, that the younger generations have no recourse but to escape into VR, to spend their entire lives living a fabricated existence so they can pretend their lives aren't crushingly desolate and empty. And that world is so vapid, so void in creativity, life, or soul, that the entire culture is built around the popular media of decades past. Nothing new is created anymore, the old is simply recycled and regurgitated. At some point in their history, new art stopped being created, either because humanity as a whole lost the desire to produce it, or because the capitalists who control culture and society deemed new art unnecessary. Probably a mix of both. These kids live in a circular hell of off-air reruns, and there's a whole lot thematically to explore there, sitting just under the surface like an untapped goldmine.
But instead the book is about this kid beating Elon Musk in VRchat by understanding more 80s references and winning all the wealth and power he could ever want, or something. One could almost suggest that the book's absolute refusal to engage with its own concepts and worldbuilding are, in a way, its own searing commentary. That all the characters are just completely blind to it, complicit, happy to eat the slop they're continually fed, happy to be another link in a human centipede of culture, Starship Troopers style. A Starship Troopers-style film adaptation of this book would have been legendary, imo
But then, that's not describing the characters. That's describing the author.
