So I recently picked up ‘Ready Player One’ in the op shop. It sat on my bookshelf for a while, and I’ve just read it this week. And I can tell you – this is a geek fest of epic proportions. If you ever geeked out about anything in the 80s (or even 90s), it’s in there, and you will love this book.

It has a very realistic depiction of the evolution of the internet, online games, and just general internet interaction and usage. I mucked around a lot on the internet during the 90s and early noughties, and chat rooms, interaction of people online (trash talk, arguments, and generally destroying the low level player who made the mistake of taking a crack at you when you were pissed off) all of this hits home. The offline stuff is great dystopian near future fiction too. This includes stuff like trailer parks (but stacked 20 trailers high because of lack of space), nasty corporations willing to cheat and kill to take over a far more successful entity’s assets, and indentured ’employment’ if your credit card bill gets too high.

Best of all, this book doesn’t make the mistake of trying to pretend that gaming, internet usage, coding and having a ton of knowledge about a particular interest is a boys-only club. So full points there.

If you like scifi dystopian, especially if you’re into all the geekery, definitely check this one out (if you have already, why not reply to this email and let me know you thought). And now next on my list is to actually see the movie!