If you can imagine a Cory Doctorow novel that has less technical agenda and more pop-culture fun then you can imagine this book and you should read it. If you can't then I'll write a review for it.
The story is this: it's the future. The world has gone on but class differences are huge and the environment is pretty bad. A while back some brilliant and eccentric man invented something that's like a cross between World of Warcraft and Second Life. And even stranger is that it caught on globally. Some public schools are hosted in this virtual world. And then the creator dies and everything goes all Willy Wonka.
You see, the creator was a huge fan of 1980s pop culture. What is slight nostalgia for us is, in the future, historical nostalgia for him. And it's played out to bizarre extremes. And in the swirls of this obsession he created a scavenger hunt in his online world. The first person to complete the scavenger hunt wins his company. And there are devotees who spend their lives consuming 80s pop culture non-stop, hoping to find a clue that no one else can get.
On one level it's almost a parody of what is now considered hipster culture: knowing insane amounts of minutiae n order to one up everyone else. But in the full context of this story it's actually a love letter to subcultures and nerds. These fans and gamers are nerds for this person and his online creation and, by way of that, are nerds for the 1980s. They share a language and knowledge about things that sets them apart all the more from everyone else and it strengthens them rather than isolating them.
And isolation and community is what this book is all about. You have people competing together and alone for the prize. Nuggets of John Hughs trivia is shared like an expensive gourmet food and horded like cash. Friends can only be team mates to a point before they become each other's competition. And that community of giving, taking, and hunting is so much fun to watch.
Cline could come across as nerd-elite with references for references sake but doesn't. Instead he manages to convey the drive these people have for learning instead of just having a parade of one ups-manship. This book could have easily been terrible. It's not. It's great. The characters breath and the plot rolls along. In addition to all of this the world building is revealed with great pacing, details popping up naturally instead of large data dumps. Or maybe they do come in data dumps but the world earns them because it is a culture and economy of information. Depending on how you look at it, the reader earns trivia about their world as they trade trivia about ours. But however you take the pacing this book is a tightly woven read.
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