I also just finished the book–rapidly. A good romp, and as someone above said, a love letter to the 80s, but the one thing that took me out of the plot was… … the deus ex machina of Ogden Morrow whisking the four principals away to Oregon to conduct the final campaign. Just too abrupt, and too convenient. Oh well–I suppose it would have needed a few hundred more pages to do differently.
It’s been a while since I read it, and my general reaction mirrors that of most dopers (fun, don’t think about it too much, do NOT read Armada, which sucked).
I do have a few things that irritated me, although I may get some of the names and details wrong, as it was now many years ago that I read it:
(1) The initial breakthrough that our hero makes is to notice that there’s a pattern of stones on some planet that is the same as some map in some D&D module (like I said, it’s been a while). This strikes me as WAY too easy and obvious for something that stumped everyone in the world for 5 years. People would have been throwing together enormous searches comparing every map feature of every world in the game to every image in every frame of every movie and every page of every book etc etc.
(2) Maybe it’s just because I’m a video game programmer myself, but I’d have liked to know what the opinion was of the people who actually worked at the company that ran the game. MMOs don’t just run themselves. Were any of them poking around in the source code? Did any of them have opinions about the bad guys vs the good guys? Etc. etc.
(3) There was a scene fairly late in the book in which the chief bad guy takes our hero (in virtual space) to some place and reveals how truly evil he is, and then is like “but no one will believe you”. Maybe it’s just the era of Twitch talking now, but how would he know that our hero wasn’t recording the whole thing? I vaguely remember a mention that he disabled the playback in the game itself, but that’s not how computers work… Heck, he could have just been pointing his iphone at his computer screen!
Well, there wasn’t a “screen” since the headset used lasers to put the image directly on your retinas. So Wade wouldn’t have been able to record the image that way. He also used a dedicated OASIS console so perhaps running 3rd party programs for recording, etc wasn’t a possibility the same way it would be if you were using a PC. If I’m remembering correctly, access to the OASIS required a dedicated console; there was no stand alone, run on your PC or Xbox option.
I didn’t really get the sense that Artemis was a “total cow” – Cline calls Aech “overweight” in the narration and Wade uses the word “fat”. Wade also comments on his own getting fat prior to his hitting the virtual gym and getting calorie limited meals. But Artemis gets euphemisms like “curvy” and “Rubenesque”. Wade is initially impressed that she had a realistic body type avatar and not one of the porn star looking models most people used. I saw that more as Artemis was a Unique And Special Spirit for doing so, not that Wade was saintly for being attracted to a charity case…
…But I agree that using those descriptors for someone 5’7" &160lbs is a bit overboard. I noted it as well but chalked it up to Cline not really knowing what a body type looked like & measured at or bothering to find out.
That’s may be the case, but it would have taken seconds to Google the average height and weight for an American woman (about 5’4" and 168 lbs, according to the CDC) or he could have just not specified Artemis’s height and weight. Most novelists don’t tell the reader the heroine’s exact stats, so it really ticked me off that Cline felt it necessary to reveal that Artemis was actually of above-average height and roughly average weight after making such a big deal about how “short and Rubenesque” she was.