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Ready Player One and the Reassertion of US Economic and Technological Supremacy
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 68, Number 2, Summer 2022
- pp. 201-218
- 10.1353/mfs.2022.0009
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.