Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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*Its weaknesses are the weaknesses of youth, in both the author and the protagonist: a tendency toward spectacle over interiority, a confidence in plot mechanics that occasionally outpaces the emotional development of the people driving them. The book earns its ending but not always its middle. These are, in the context of what surrounds them, small complaints.*

*Seven out of ten. Which, from a writer who is currently enrolled in whatever passes for middle school in the Meyers household, represents an achievement that the literary community should probably spend less time qualifying and more time simply acknowledging.”*

*Rating: 7/10*

*The Washington Post* had been more direct about its reservations:

*”The concept of* Ready Player One *is genuinely brilliant — a virtual world so comprehensive and compelling that the real world has been functionally abandoned, and the contest to control it has become the defining event of a generation. This is good science fiction thinking: specific, extrapolative, grounded in actual trajectories of technology and human behavior rather than pure fantasy. The execution is good without being great. The philosophical weight that the concept deserves is present but not fully developed — the book asks its big questions and then moves briskly on before the answers have had time to fully form. The result is a novel that is very enjoyable and occasionally something more than enjoyable, but not yet the major work that the concept could sustain in different hands — or, perhaps, the same hands with another decade of experience behind them.*

*Six out of ten, and genuinely meant as a compliment.”*

*Rating: 6/10*

Marvin read all of these with the equanimity of someone who had expected approximately this response and was neither disappointed nor validated by its confirmation. The adult literary establishment was responding to the book as a literary object evaluated against literary standards, which was a reasonable thing to do and produced a reasonable assessment. The book was good. It was not, by the standards of the genre’s best, great. He had known this when he wrote it. He had written it for different standards.

He moved to the second stack of reviews.

The gaming press had not waited for the weekend to file its response.

*GameFan* — one of the leading gaming publications of the period, with a readership that skewed young, technically literate, and deeply invested in the emerging culture of video games as a serious artistic and cultural form — had published its review within twenty-four hours of receiving the advance copy:

**READY PLAYER ONE: THE BOOK THE GAMING WORLD DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS WAITING FOR**

*”We don’t usually review books. We review games. We review hardware. We review the occasional film when it’s relevant to our readership’s interests. We are not, as a publication, in the habit of treating prose fiction as our territory.*

*We are making an exception for* Ready Player One *because this book is our territory in a way that no novel published in living memory has been.*

*Marvin Meyers — who you may know as a musical prodigy whose debut EP has now crossed six million units in sales, or as the author of* Kung Fu Panda*, which has become the most successful children’s book of the decade — has written a novel that understands video games. Not in the way that most cultural commentary understands video games — from the outside, with the slightly condescending curiosity of an anthropologist examining a foreign practice — but from the inside. With the granular, experiential knowledge of someone who has actually played, actually competed, actually understood what it feels like to inhabit a virtual world and why that experience is not a lesser version of real experience but a different kind of real experience with its own stakes and its own validity.*

*The OASIS is the best fictional representation of what networked virtual reality will eventually become that we have encountered in any medium. It is better than* Snow Crash*’s Metaverse — more specific, more economically coherent, more attentive to the social dynamics that would actually emerge from a world in which digital and physical reality have traded places. The gaming culture within the OASIS — the texture of its competitions, its hierarchies, its economies, its communities — is rendered with an accuracy that made this reviewer stop reading on multiple occasions simply to process the recognition.*

*This is us. This is where we are going. This book knows it.*

*The adult literary press, we note, has given it sixes and sevens and questioned the depth of its characterization. With respect: the adult literary press has misidentified the book’s primary achievement. The characters are vivid and serve their function. The world is the protagonist. And the world is extraordinary.*

*Ten out of ten. Buy it. Read it. Then read it again when the internet is bigger and see how much more of it you understand.”*

*Rating: 10/10*

*Computer Gaming World* had been similarly effusive, though with the specific technical focus of its publication:

*”The technical world-building in* Ready Player One *is, by the standards of any fiction we have encountered, extraordinary. The OASIS’s underlying architecture — the way its servers work, its latency solutions, its economic structure, its governance mechanisms, the digital slavery — is described with a specificity that suggests the author has thought about these problems as engineering problems rather than fictional conveniences. The book’s vision of how a global virtual reality network would actually function, what its failure modes would be, what its social consequences would be, is more sophisticated than most technical journalism we have published on related subjects.*

*We are a gaming magazine. We know what we are talking about when we talk about virtual worlds. This book knows what it is talking about.*

*The gaming industry is going to claim this book. The literary establishment’s sixes and sevens are, with respect, missing the point. This is not a book about people. It is a book about a world, and the world it is about is the world we are in the process of building, and it understands that world better than we currently understand it ourselves.*

*Essential reading. Nine out of ten.”*

*Rating: 9/10*

The technology press — still finding its voice in 1997, the major tech publications existing in a form that was recognizable as journalism but not yet fully developed into the cultural force they would become — had picked up the book with the enthusiasm of a community encountering something that spoke to their specific concerns:

*Wired* had run a full feature, not just a review:

**THE CHILD WHO SAW THE FUTURE: MARVIN MEYERS AND THE WORLD OF READY PLAYER ONE**

*”Ernest Hemingway said that all you have to do is write one true sentence. Marvin Meyers has written approximately five hundred thousand true sentences about a future that does not yet exist but that everyone who has spent time thinking seriously about where digital technology is going will recognize immediately.*

*Ready Player One* is, on its surface, an adventure story. Underneath that surface, it is a piece of speculative non-fiction — a description of where the internet, virtual reality technology, and the economics of digital platforms are going, rendered in the form of fiction because the form of fiction allows certain kinds of truth to arrive without the defenses that non-fiction triggers.*

*The OASIS is not a fantasy. It is an extrapolation. Every element of its design — the haptic feedback systems, the avatar economy, the corporate governance battles, the social dynamics of a world where physical location no longer determines community — is derivable from trends that were already visible in 1997 if you know where to look. Meyers has looked. He has looked more carefully and with more technical sophistication than most professional futurists, and he has rendered what he has seen in prose that is accessible to a mass audience without sacrificing the precision that makes it genuinely useful as a predictive document.*

*We spoke with several technology executives and developers who had read advance copies. Their responses were consistent: recognition, excitement, and in several cases a specific quality of alarm — the alarm of people who are building something and have encountered a description of where it leads that is considerably ahead of their own thinking.*

*’He’s describing the virtual verse,’ one developer told us, using a term that is not yet common currency. ’He’s describing exactly what happens when this all scales. And he’s right about the problems it creates.’*

*Marvin Meyers is twelve years old. He has now produced a children’s book that has become a global cultural phenomenon, an EP that has sold six million copies, and a novel that the technology industry is treating as a roadmap and a warning simultaneously. We are running out of ways to adequately describe what we are looking at.*

*Perhaps the simplest description is also the most accurate: we are looking at someone who understands the future better than most people understand the present.”*

The sales figures that Random House was calling about were, Amy reported when she relayed the content of the morning’s communications, exceeding first-week projections by a margin that had produced something approaching controlled panic in the publishing house’s sales department — the kind of panic that arrives when demand significantly outpaces prepared supply.

The initial print run had been two hundred and fifty thousand copies — substantial for a debut novel by any author, extraordinary for a debut novel by a twelve-year-old, and calibrated to the expectation of strong but manageable sales driven by the existing Marvin Meyers audience. This expectation had been, within thirty-six hours of the book’s availability, demonstrated to be significantly conservative.

The first-day sell-through at major retailers had been approximately thirty six percent of available stock — a figure that, extrapolated against the initial print run and the reorder cycles of major chains, suggested a first-week total that would place *Ready Player One* on the *New York Times* bestseller list in a position that the Random House team had not anticipated for at least three weeks.

The gaming community, it turned out, bought books when the books were about them.

The technology community, it turned out, bought books when the books described their field with accuracy and seriousness.

Kids, and Teenagers — who had encountered *Kung Fu Panda* as a children’s book, who are growing up into the age of video games and the early internet and were looking for fiction that reflected the world they were actually living in rather than a version of the world that adults imagined they occupied — were buying it in numbers that no publisher’s demographic modeling had prepared for.

”The reprint is being expedited,” Amy said, standing in the doorway of the study with her notebook open and her pen ready. ”Random House wants to know if you’re available for a phone call with the publicity team this afternoon.”

”Two o’clock,” Marvin said, without looking up from the review he was reading.

”The gaming press has been calling since early this morning. *GameFan, Computer Gaming World, GamePro, Nintendo Power* — all of them want comment or interview.”

”Select two,” he said. ”The most widely read. Prioritize the ones that have a meaningful online and offline presence.”

”*GameFan* and *Computer Gaming World,*” she said, without hesitation. She had learned, in the weeks of this employment, to pre-select rather than simply relay requests.

”Good,” he said. ”Thursday for both.”

She made the notation. ”And the literary press —”

”They’ve said what they wanted to say,” he said. ”The sixes and sevens are fine. I’m not arguing with sixes and sevens.” He turned a page. ”What else?”

”*Kung Fu Panda* — the Random House team also wants to discuss the new edition. The Japanese publisher is requesting a full author’s note for the Asian market editions and the Chinese publisher has requested —”

”The author’s note is already written,” he said. ”Amy sent it last week.” He caught himself — a fractional pause that she had learned to recognize as the moment when he recalibrated a sentence. ”You sent it last week. Check with the Japanese team on receipt.”

She made the notation, and did not comment on the correction, because she had learned not to comment on those moments. ”The *EP Marvin 1* figures —”

”Six million, two hundred thousand as of this morning’s SoundScan,” he said.

She looked up from her notebook. ”How did you —”

”The label called at six-fifteen,” he said. ”I was awake.”

She had stopped being surprised by the hours he kept. She had not stopped finding them slightly unnerving. ”The label also wants to discuss the follow-up timeline. They’re asking whether the second EP is on schedule for a Q1 release.”

”Tell them after Sixth Sense,” he said. ”And tell them I don’t want to rush things with Music.”

She wrote it down. Outside the study window the November garden was doing its mild, Los Angeles version of autumn — the light at the angle that made the estate’s old trees look like something from a different century, which in several cases they were.

”Is that everything?” he said.

”Almost,” she said. ”There’s a call request from Mr. Spielberg’s office.”

The pen stopped moving. Marvin looked up from the review for the first time since she had entered the room.

”Steven Spielberg’s office,” she said, with careful neutrality. ”They called at eight-forty. The message says Mr. Spielberg read an advance copy of *Ready Player One* and would like to speak with you at your earliest convenience.”

Marvin looked at her for a moment.

Then he set down the review and leaned back in his chair — the particular quality of stillness that she associated with him processing something significant.

”Friday,” he said. ”Call his office and schedule for Friday afternoon. Two PM.”

She wrote it down.

”Amy,” he said.

”Yes?”

”Clear my Friday morning as well.”

She looked up. ”Cleared for what?”

”Thinking,” he said.

She wrote that down too, though the notation felt slightly absurd. She had learned that it was not.

*****

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