Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut - part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots.

It’s the year 2044, and 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  virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, on any of 10,000 planets.

Somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield fortune - and power - to whoever can unlock them. Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved - that of the late 20th century. For years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, in happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of them, 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.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Thousands of competitors join the hunt - among them players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. The only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But he may have to leave behind his perfect virtual existence and face up to life - and love - in the real world he’s always been desperate to escape.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?