Review Wednesday – Ready Player One by Earnest Cline

Set in 2045, the world is a sadly dangerous and depleted place and Oklahoma teenager Wade Watts lives in a dwelling known to residents as The Stacks. Though the author doesn’t go overboard with his description of this housing (and he does with lots of other descriptions) I quickly formed a vivid and overwhelmingly  depressing mental picture of the place. It’s understandable that anyone unfortunate enough to live there would need some kind of escapism. 

Luckily,  James Halliday, eccentric, mega-wealthy and deceased, had made it his life’s work to invent Oasis, a virtual Utopia where everyone goes by their Avatar and life is good. In his will, Halliday leaves Oasis and all his millions to the person who can find the keys and unlock the Easter Egg, the ultimate prize. 

A quirk that is vital to any chance of winning the prize is an in-depth knowledge of 80’s pop and games culture. Wade, in his avatar guise as Parzival has made it his mission to be an expert and has played 80’s games over and over in a bid to know every character and move. He thinks he has a serious chance of taking the prize but he is not alone, and some of those undertaking the quest are not as friendly or as honest as Parzival’s virtual best friend Aech, or Art3mis or Shoto and Daito.

There is a dark underbelly in the real world and they are determined to win. 

Ready Player One is fun. It’s basically some computer characters wielding their swords and finding golden keys. But there is a huge amount of description, almost like a walk-through of a computer game and, despite excellent narration on Audible, at times I just wanted something to happen. This is a long book, longer, for me, than it needed to be. The 80’s stuff could be a bit wearing. At it’s heart is a love story, a good v evil battle, a dystopian nightmare of what the world might become. It’s the kind of book that I probably enjoyed more in the reflection of it afterwards, rather than some of the real-time reading. But it did make me reflect – and not all books do that. 

Pines by Blake Crouch

I am always attracted by those kind of blurbs that offer an intriguing dilemma and lately that has caused me to dip my toes into the world of Sci-if on more than one occasion.
The pines by Blake Crouch is such a book. Just after I purchased the audiobook, but before I started listening, someone told me they had watched the TV series and it was pretty bad. That put me off and I delayed. But honestly, I have enjoyed so many books that, in my personal opinion, have not been adapted well for the screen, that I knew I wanted to give the book a fair chance.
On the whole, I am glad I did, though, as with much of the science fiction genre, I think it is relatively easy for a good writer to come up with that killer scenario and much harder for him/her to explain all the mysterious goings on and come to a satisfying conclusion.

First though, I would like to say that, though this is the first in a trilogy, I didn’t feel cheated at the end of the book with a no-resolution type ending. Answers are given, a handful of loose ends tied.
Ethan Burke wakes by a river, he is hurt, has been in some kind of accident but he has no memory of it, or how he got there. He has no keys, wallet ID or anything else to identify himself.

He is told he was involved in a car accident, his companion killed and that he staggered out of the medical centre when staff were trying to help him. His belongings are with paramedic staff. So far, so believable, but Ethan is already beginning to worry that something is off kilter with the explanations he is being given.

He asks for the use of a telephone to contact his wife and son, his efforts to reach her are thwarted. As time goes on, Ethan is witness to violence and coercion and the definite knowledge that he and everyone else in the town are not at liberty to leave.

*Warning ! Spoiler alert from this point*

I usually prefer to skirt around the story and make my points without giving anything away but, with this one, I find it impossible to comment on, without touching on the issues that surround the reason for this isolated-town-with-no-way-out.

The basics are that Homo sapiens have died out beyond the confines of the town of Wayward Pines. In fact, everyone who lives there is an import, brought in, unknown to them, to continue the species before the disaster which will befall their fellow humans and see the end of their race.

One man in the 1980’s has had the foresight to see what will happen to the human race, through pollution of the planet. He took it upon himself to embark on the massive project of buying up a town and planning to repopulate it with people he kidnapped along the way and put into stasis until the right time came to introduce them to their new life. This is what has happened to Ethan.

Beyond the town evolution-gone-mad (in thirty generations) has transformed what remains of life into huge, jaw-snapping creatures, intelligent, hungry for human blood and impossible to communicate with. Towns and cities are overgrown and in ruins.

Of course the reader has to accept this crazy, evolutionary fast-forward that produced these creatures in under two thousand years, but this is science fiction, so… so far so good.

What didn’t work for me so well, was that the people were ‘kidnapped’ with such secrecy into the survival programme that even they were not told they were part of it. But more than that, the environmental changes that have been so profound as to wipe out humanity and send life on Earth on a completely different path, doesn’t appear to have affected the plant life. The town of Wayward Pines does not exist in a bubble of pre-disaster air and yet the town looks just like any ordinary old town of 2015, (two thousand years ago). And the surviving humans seem quite able to cope with the changes.

Science fiction is often a disappointment for me and maybe that’s not entirely science fiction’s fault, maybe I just think it out too much. However this kind of fiction is for pure entertainment and I was definitely entertained, I really wanted to know, as much as Ethan did, if he could break out of this weird village where he was being held captive and if he could find out why. I just wish the town had been isolated in some kind of dome, Logan’s Run style, where the environmental changes ‘outside’ could not affect them.

Then again, maybe the environment hasn’t changed? Maybe the Jaw Snappers are the result of some other mad experiment?

I may well have to read the second instalment!

Wednesday Review – The Stone Man by Luke Smitherd

Hankering after something ‘different’, I picked up this book from Audible.

The story has a great premise and it is very different. Plus Plus.

What I liked about The Stone Man was the great idea; a giant stone figure appears, literally from nowhere. Then it begins to move, obliterating everything in its path. No one knows what it is or how to stop it.

Andy, our narrator, is one of the first people on the scene when The Stone Man appears. He is a reporter and he sees, as the destruction begins, a great opportunity to make his name with this story. Unfortunately Andy is not a greatly likeable character and, as the book progressed I found myself less likely to hope the best for him.

The writing style was easy to listen to throughout and the intrigue was there right from the first chapter, but for me, it dragged a little, with too much mulling over what was happening. I see the book has mixed reviews and usually find that a good indicator; maybe I am just not so into Sci-fi, or possibly sci-if with no answers. The implications were horrific for some characters in the book, but I wouldn’t call it a horror book either. I think maybe it was a mistake to label the book, ‘A Sci-fi Thriller’;

I am on the fence, therefore; an enjoyable book, a great idea but maybe not for me.

Finally, the author speaks in his own voice at the end, quite a long footnote about authorship and reviews. I don’t mind authors asking for reviews at all; they need them. But I felt he ventured too far into the nature of the end of the book. Some readers found it too ambiguous, but it was the ending the author chose. However, I felt he attempted to justify it too much. Maybe that would have been better left alone.

‘Interesting’, is a word I might use for this particular reading experience. I would read more from this author.