Ready Player One and the Reassertion of US Economic and Technological Supremacy

Abstract

Abstract:This essay offers a geopolitical reading of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011), focusing on the novel's often-overlooked Japanese characters. While the novel is set in 2045, its narrative is an allegory for present-day global economic tensions between a recession-era US and a rising Asia. By reducing the novel's Japanese characters to premodern and postmodern Japanese tropes (the samurai and the hikikomori [shut-in]), Cline portrays Japan as an economic and technological threat that has been contained, and thus models a future in which American individualism wins out over Asian collectivism.