Ready Player One

2045 is poor, hot and crowded, so most people spend their lives inside the OASIS, a virtual world that is also the school system and the economy. Its creator dies without heirs and leaves his fortune to whoever can find three keys hidden inside it. The clues are all drawn from the things he loved as a teenager in the 1980s, which turns the whole planet into amateur scholars of Atari games and John Hughes films.

It is a quest novel with a very clean engine — three keys, three gates, a corporate villain with unlimited resources trying to buy the answer. Cline is good at the set pieces, and the best of them involve playing a perfect game of a specific arcade cabinet with the world watching.

The reference density is the whole personality of the book and it splits readers cleanly: it is either a warm bath of recognition or a list of things you are expected to already like. What survives either reading is the premise itself, which has aged from science fiction into something closer to reportage.