READY PLAYER ONE is part quest novel, part love story & part virtual space opera.
It's the year 2044 & the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be. A place where you can live & play & fall in love on any of ten thousand planets & like most of humanity Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune & remarkable power to whoever can unlock them.
For years millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize knowing only that Halliday's riddles are based in the pop culture he loved that of the late twentieth century & for years millions have found in this quest another means of escape retreating into happy obsessive study of Halliday's icons. Like many of his contemporaries Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes's oeuvre playing Pac-Man or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig & then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.
Suddenly the whole world is watching & thousands of competitors join the hunt among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive & preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so he may have to leave behind his oh so perfect virtual existence & face up to life & love in the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.
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