Set in a dystopian future dependent on virtual reality and threatened by environmental decline, Ready Player One is a tale of a teenager's quest through cyberspace to solve a puzzle that will define his world and his place in it. Wade struggles with good and evil on his way to self-discovery and a new understanding of what it means to be human in a technologically-dominant world. Uniting the past and present, author Ernest Cline asks us to think about key concerns in contemporary life and technology’s place in our future: social networking, online identity, environmental sustainability, online education, and our relationship to the past.