One Player, Unready
A few years back some old high-school friends were in town for the holidays, and one of them found out about a late-night screening of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Being proper Xennial nerd-men, we all met up at the local multiplex and sat in the back row like the cool kids we never were at school.
Soon after the movie started, I noticed something weird: Most of the half-full theatre was laughing at the jokes.
My friends and I had heard, quoted, cited, and/or acted out all the funny bits far too many times to actually laugh at them. Instead, we were laughing at the scene changes that reminded us of what was coming next. The other theatre-goers rolled in the aisles after all the punchlines — but we, true Python fans, were only chuckling at establishing shots.
All of which is to say that READY PLAYER ONE should be one of my favorite books, because it was written for people exactly like me.
But my history as a reader and writer of science fiction has a black hole in it. For about a decade between the birth of my eldest child and quitting my day job, the geek-stuff consumption-production machine in my head was switched off. I missed RPO, and a whole bunch of influential work before and after it. But after my first year as a full-time sportswriter, it occurred to me: I always wanted to be a writer, and now I am!
I dove back into genre-fiction fandom headfirst, trawling the Internet for the great books I’d missed and fishing for what all the cool geeks were into. I went to my first real con, and then took my eldest to her first real con. I attended panels, followed authors and editors on Twitter, subscribed to blogs and podcasts and (most importantly) read and wrote a whole bunch.
Even though this was in 2014, a few years after READY PLAYER ONE’s publication, many people were still referencing it as an exciting, innovative work that spoke both to and about the nature of fandom itself. But almost as soon as I added it to my to-read shelf (Goodreads! What a cool new website!), I noticed women in the industry tended to speak of the book with qualifications and a tight smile.
“Ah, well, of course I love READY PLAYER ONE like everyone else, but…”
Like many of the books I intended to catch up on, I didn’t get to it right away. And as I heard more about it, ‘not right away’ became ‘not for a long time’ and then eventually ‘never.’
Plus, there were so many brilliant and fascinating new books and blogs and magazines that I couldn’t keep up — going backwards seemed as pointless as it was impossible. Why would I? There were all these new authors, new genres and subgenres, new voices, new visions, new worlds to explore. Storytellers drawing from cultures, myths, backgrounds and identities to which I’d never been exposed. Storytellers influenced by (and influencing!) movies, anime, video games, cosplayers, audio and video streamers. A community of fannish communities far more broad, diverse, and in communication with itself than the one I’d left.
But then…GamerGate. Sad Puppies. Rabid Puppies. The various iterations and reiterations of RaceFail, the #BlackSpecFic reports, several rounds of #MeToo-style revelations and allegations. The SFF community was in conversation with itself, but it was also at war with itself.
In the context of all this, a book where the world can only be saved by a true and proper nerd-man who could recite all of Holy Grail on demand wasn’t just uninteresting, it was all the worst aspects of fandom rolled into one — the embodiment of all the gatekeepy, shamey, exclusionary rituals forward-thinking fans had grown to hate about old-school fandom.
As cultural critic Klaudia Amenábar put it, embedded here with permission:
The 2018 movie adaptation was the perfect opportunity to revisit the book’s many craft and premise failures, as well as the author’s own, uh, personal quirks. The universality of the book’s Geek Canon was viciously skewered by anyone who paid any attention to girl-targeted IP of the same era — or any geeky IP before or since.
But Tuesday morning, “READY PLAYER TWO” dropped — and according to everybody with a copy and a Twitter account, the sequel is so completely saturated with the worst aspects of the original that it serves as self-parody far more biting than McSweeney’s old send-up with the exact same title.
But just as the snickering read-through livetweet threads were going up, a bombshell came down: SyFy’s Fangrrls subsite announced it was closing, ending a four-year run of smart, funny, geeky paid content created by and for a diverse set of feminine fans. Contributor Stephanie Williams was one of many readers, writers, and editors gutted by the loss:
I recommend reading the replies to the announcement tweet.
It’s a bitter coincidence: A one-hit-wonder white guy releases an awful sequel to his book of white-guy-media in-jokes, presumably so a sequel to the movie adaptation can drag us all into its own whole pile of corporate-IP tie-ins. Meanwhile, a host of marginalized editors and writers who created great, unique, beloved content have now lost a job, a paying market, a common home.
In the war between “snarky white guys” and “literally everybody else,” there’s no question which side I’m fighting for. I want the future of genre fiction to be better than its past, not repeat it. I want young fans to feel empowered to make their imaginations reality. I want to be a part of the world being built by all the brilliant, vibrant, diverse collectivists everywhere exploring the frontiers of what it means to be human.
But what scares me is thinking about whether, on the other side of that black hole, is a Me who could have ended up on the other side of the war. A me who didn’t start a family, but retreated into familiar comforts. A me who disengaged with everything except himself, who stopped believing in anything but his own innate superiority. Who stopped trying to become a better man, and began asserting that being a man made him better.
I’ll never know if the time I spent away from the community changed the kind of fan and writer I ended up trying to be. I pray I’ll never ossify into the kind of fan or writer I didn’t up becoming. But I know I haven’t lost my way yet, and I think my moral compass is true.
After all, Monty Python taught me the meaning of life: “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
