Ready Player One

2044. The real world is in ruins. Out of oil, the climate destroyed, famine, poverty and disease are widespread.

Like almost everyone, Wade Watts has an escape - the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where you can be anything you want to be, where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets. And like almost everyone, he's on the hunt for the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this alternate reality - control of the OASIS, courtesy of the wish of its now-dead architect, James Halliday.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that the riddles are based in the culture of the late 20th century. And then Wade stumbles onto the key to the first puzzle. Suddenly, he finds himself pitted against thousands of competitors in a desperate race to claim the ultimate prize, a chase that soon takes on terrifying real-world dimensions - and that will leave both Wade and his world profoundly changed.

Now adapted by Steven Spielberg into a film of the same name, Ready Player One is both the virtual reality novel we wanted all along and the debut of a major talent in genre fiction. Knowing, breathlessly entertaining and dripping with more pop-culture references than every episode of The Simpsons put together, Ernest Cline's eluogy to the 80s has to be one of first essential SF novels of the 21st century.