The image of the future in Ernest Cline’s quest novel «Ready player one»

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the image of the future depicted in Ernest Cline's novel "Ready Player One" and the main futurological ideas of the work. Fantasy literature with its extensive system of genres currently appears as a platform for the establishment and dissemination in the mass consciousness and collective imagination of the image of the future of individual people and humanity, and, unlike the previous tradition, modern fantasy influences the formation of the aforementioned ideas at many levels at once. The genre features of Ernest Cline's novel "Ready Player One" are determined primarily by the fact that it is a science fiction novel. This determines its nature as a metagenre, capable of combining the features of other genres of literary creativity, as well as the sphere of scientific thinking, social analytics, everyday culture, etc. Besides, the novel's belonging to the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk tradition founded by William Gibson, finds its expression in the depiction of the future as a socio-technological dystopia, which indicates the significant humanistic potential of the novel, that is, its direct and indirect appeal to specifically human values that would defend human identity in the face of technological challenges.

The image of the future created in Ernest Cline's novel is quite ambiguous. On the one hand, it is a gloomy social dystopia that depicts the decline of human civilization on a dying planet, in which humanity finds salvation in escaping into the virtual space of computer simulation. On the other hand, the main social structures, although transformed, are preserved and functioning (in particular, the social institution of education, the entertainment industry, the economic system), and humanity adapts to the conditions established by the lack of resources and the ecological and economic crisis. The novel focuses on the fate of the young generation, who must choose between a life on social assistance and an attempt to take control of a total planetary simulation. Actually, it is about a certain virtual revolution as a warning of total control of virtual space by corporations. The future involves both the ideas of social resistance and defiance, and the path of evolutionary adaptation and optimization of existing functioning mechanisms of the social. In the future, protest and conformity coexist, and it does not involve self-destruction as self-destruction. We can state the humanistic potential of the image of the future in the novel. The novel depicts reality as a game, which also indicates a change in attitude towards reality as such. The future in the novel emphasizes not assessments or ideological or political appeals, but the desire to survive and be, therefore the future of the novel is a philosophy of existence in digital reality. Prospects for further research are outlined by the possibility of considering the latest literary genres associated with the digitalization of cultural and life forms and understanding the categorical framework of the latest philosophical picture of the world, which is represented by fiction.