Cat Acree

Haijin is a Japanese word that colloquially refers to gamers who spend so much time playing that their alternate realities take precedence over the real world. Imagine a world where this is the norm. After all, virtual weddings and virtual funerals have existed in role-playing games such as World of Warcraft for years. Take this premise, add in an impressive knowledge of 1980s pop culture factoids and an apocalyptic setting, and you have Ready Player One, the debut from Fanboys screenwriter Ernest Cline.

It’s the year 2044. Wade Watts’ life is beyond desolate, and he has little hope of rising above his poverty. Faced with such a bleak reality, nearly everyone spends their days logged into OASIS, the massive online paradise created by billionaire James Halliday. However, when Halliday died, he announced the beginning of the ultimate quest: somewhere deep within OASIS are clues that will lead one player to the entirety of Halliday’s estate. Five years have gone by, and no one seems to have gotten anywhere—until one day, Wade stumbles over the first puzzle. Immediately, the race is on, and while several other gamers are hot on Wade’s trail, the greatest threat is from the Sixers, those who are willing to kill to gain control of the OASIS.

Ready Player One is a fantastic YA crossover, with a massive wealth of ’80s facts and jokes, barebones prose, pubescent love and simplified outlines of the political and economic state of the world. However, readers who grew up in the era and are able to appreciate the devotion Cline poured into his homage (much like James Halliday’s game itself) will find this novel to be endlessly entertaining. The puzzles are pure, unadulterated fun, and the arc of the story mirrors many of the movies referenced in the book. Best of all, there is a lovable nerdy undercurrent—after all, it turns out that the key to success is reading absolutely everything. Not to mention the subtle suggestion that while games and movies are awesome, it is also a good idea to go outside every once in a while.

Our cars can parallel park themselves. Our vacuums can zoom independently around the carpet. Add a few advancements in artificial intelligence and the setting in Robopocalypse is not so different from today. That is what makes Daniel H. Wilson’s debut novel so jarring.

Robopocalypse begins at the end, several years after Zero Hour, the moment when all the robots in the world turned against humanity. The New War has been won and the robot behind it all—Archos—has been defeated. Readers meet Cormac Wallace, whose crew of guerrillas finds a solid black cube buried deep underground. Within the cube is a special file kept by Archos that includes security footage, recorded conversations and stored video, all documenting the humans Archos had considered “heroes.” As one of those heroes, Cormac takes it upon himself to write their stories. The result is a truly entertaining, gruesome and humbling novel, with each chapter memorializing the humans and robots that were most pivotal in the rise and fall of the New War. The seemingly unrelated heroes, scattered across the globe and described with an intensity that suggests that each is more important than the last, give shape to Robopocalypse as their minute rebellions come together for the singular cause of survival.

Wilson, despite his Ph.D. in robotics, allows nearly no time for jargon as the apocalyptic pacing burns through the story. The chapters feature children, an old Japanese man, soldiers in the Middle East and old-world warriors in Oklahoma, and each voice allows new humor and horror, instantly banning any chance for a moment’s rest. There’s a reason Steven Spielberg has a movie version of the novel in the works: Wilson’s debut is one of a kind.