Ready Player One

Ready Player One (2011) by Ernest Cline is set in 2045, a future of energy shortages, environmental decline, and economic collapse where much of daily life has migrated into the OASIS, a vast virtual reality system that functions simultaneously as entertainment, marketplace, and social world. The story follows Wade Watts, a teenager living in the stacked trailer slums outside Oklahoma City, who joins a global competition to uncover an Easter egg hidden within the OASIS by its late creator. The novel is steeped in 1980s pop-culture references, but its underlying concern is corporate control of digital space, embodied by the conglomerate Innovative Online Industries, which relies on debt-based indenture and an army of corporate avatars known as Sixers to seize the platform. Adapted into a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg in 2018.

Signed by Ernest Cline and Wil Wheaton on the title page. Wheaton, an American actor and voice actor, narrated the audiobook edition of Ready Player One and also appears within the novel’s fictional universe alongside Cory Doctorow as a reelected official of the OASIS User Council. Cline and Wheaton conducted a joint signing tour; this copy was signed at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington, on October 11, 2011.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Crown, 2011. Georgia Peach Book Award for Teen Readers nominee (2013). ISBN: 9780307887436. #10587.
Fine in fine dust jacket.