Cline, Ernest. Ready Player Two. New York: Ballantine Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-5247-6133-2.
Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was an enormous success, blending an imaginative but plausible extrapolation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual worlds into a mid-21st century network called the OASIS, which has subsumed the Internet and its existing services into an immersive shared virtual world encompassing communication, entertainment, education, and commerce. Ready Player One chronicled the quest of hunters for the Easter Egg hidden by the deceased co-creator of the OASIS, which would confer sole ownership and control over the OASIS on its finder, with independent egg hunters (“gunters”) contending with a corporation bent on turning the OASIS into an advertising-cluttered Hell and perfectly willing to resort to murder and mayhem to achieve its nefarious designs.

James Halliday, who hid the Egg, was obsessed with every aspect of 1980s popular culture: film, music, television, fads, and video games, and the quest for the Egg involved acquiring and demonstrating encyclopedic knowledge equal to his own. The story is thus marinated in 1980s nostalgia, and has a strong appeal for those who lived through that era, which made Ready Player One a beloved instant classic and best-seller, from which Steven Spielberg made a not-entirely-awful 2018 feature film.

With the quest and fate of the OASIS resolved at the end of the original novel, readers were left to wonder what happens next, and they had nine years to wait before a sequel appeared to answer that question. And thus, Ready Player Two, which is set just a few years after Parzival and his bang of gunters find the Egg and assume control of the OASIS, was eagerly awaited. And now we have it in our hands.

Oh dear.

One common reaction among readers who have made it through this sequel or abandoned it in disgust and dismay is that it “reads like fan fiction”. But that is to disparage the genre of fan fiction, some of which is quite good, entertaining, and obviously labours of love. This reads like bad fan fiction, written by somebody who doesn't get out enough, obsessed with “transgression” of the original story and characters. This fails in just about every way possible. While the original novel was based upon a plausible extrapolation of present-day technology into the future, here we have a randomly assembled midden of utterly unbelievable things, seemingly invented on whim in order to move the plot along, most of which were developed in just a few years and in almost complete secrecy. Rather than try to artfully give a sense for how this novel “transgresses” even the most forgiving reader's ability to suspend disbelief, I'll just step behind the curtain and make an incomplete list of things we're expected to accept as the landscape in which the plot is set. Many of these are spoilers, so if you care about such things, don't read them until you've had a crack at the book (or it has had a crack at you, as the case may be).

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.   (Show Spoilers)

I'm not going to even discuss the great quest, the big reveal, or the deus in machina switcheroo at the very end. After wrecking an interesting imagined world, destroying characters the reader had come to know and like in their first adventure, and boring the audience with over-the-top descriptions, obscure pop culture trivia, and ridiculous made-up reasons to plug all of the myriad holes in the plot, by the time I got to the end I was well past caring about any of them.

December 2020 Permalink