- 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.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.
- James Halliday, before his death, funded the successful development of an Oasis Neural Interface (ONI), which provides a full, bidirectional, link to the neurons in a user's brain, allowing complete stimulation of all senses and motor control over an avatar in the OASIS.
- The ONI is completely non-invasive: it works by sensors it places on the outside of the skull.
- The development of the ONI was conducted in complete secrecy, and was not disclosed until a trigger set by Halliday before his death revealed it to the finder of the Egg.
- The ONI is able to provide a fully realistic experience of the OASIS virtual world to the wearer. For example, when an ONI wearer eats an apple in the virtual world, they have the sensation of crunching into the fruit, smelling the juice, and tasting the flesh, even though these have not been programmed into the simulation.
- The ONI can, in a brief time, make a complete scan of its wearer's brain and download this to the OASIS. This scan is sufficient to create an in-world realisation of the person's consciousness.
- Halliday made such a scan of his own brain, creating (in total secrecy) the first artificial general intelligence (AGI), which he called Anorak. In attempting to modify this AI, he caused it to go insane and become malevolent, but the lovable nerd Halliday let it continue to inhabit the OASIS.
- Every time a user logs into the OASIS, the ONI makes a nearly-instantaneous complete backup of their brain, sufficient to create a conscious intelligent copy inside the simulation. This has been done in complete secrecy, and not only OASIS users, but its new owners are unaware of this.
- The ONI can be used a maximum of 12 hours at a time, after which (the same precise time for all wearers, regardless of their individual physiology) it causes severe and irreversible neural trauma. Disconnection from the OASIS without a proper log-out can leave the user in a permanent coma. Regulators are perfectly fine with such a technology being deployed to billions of people, relying on the vendor's assurance that safeguards will prevent such calamities.
- Over a period of three years, largely in secrecy until it leaked out, Parzival and three of his partners have had built, at a cost of US$300 billion dollars, an interstellar spacecraft with a fusion drive in which they plan to make a 47 year voyage to Proxima Centauri to “search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along.” They plan to set out on this voyage without first sending a probe to determine whether there is a habitable planet at Proxima Centauri or having a Plan B in case there isn't one when they get there. Oh, and this starship is supposed to get its power from its “solar panel array and batteries” for the four decades it will be nowhere near a star.
- Halliday, after creating the flawed artificial intelligence Anorak, leaves open the possibility that it can seize control of the OASIS from his designated heir.
- Because ONI users logged into the OASIS are effectively unconscious and completely vulnerable to attack in real life (which they call “the earl”), the well-heeled opt for an “immersion vault” to protect themselves. Gregarious Simulation Systems' (GSS) top of the line was MoTIV, the “mobile tactical immersion vault”, [which] “looked more like a heavily armed robotic spider than a coffin. It was an armored escape vehicle and all-terrain weapons platform, featuring eight retractable armored legs for navigating all forms of terrain, and a pair of machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on each side of its armored chassis—not to mention a bulletproof acrylic cockpit canopy for its occupant.” The authorities are apparently happy with such gear being sold to anybody who can pay for it.
- The rogue AI Anorak is able to bypass all of GSS's engineering, quality control, and deployment safeguards to push a software update, “infirmware”, on more than half a billion ONI users, which traps them in the simulation, unable to log out, and destined for catastrophic brain damage after the twelve hour limit is reached. This includes four of the five owners of GSS. And “Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they've never seen before”—and it worked the very first time it was mass deployed.
- Despite having the lives of half a billion hostages, including
themselves, in their hands and with the twelve hour maximum
immersion time in the ONI ticking away, Parzival and partners
find plenty of time to wisecrack, taunt one another about
their knowledge or lack thereof of obscure pop culture, and
costume changes.
Art3mis snapped her fingers and her avatar's attire changed once again. Now she wore Annie Potts's black latex outfit from her first scene in Pretty in Pink, along with her punk-rock porcupine hairdo, dangling earrings, and dinner-fork bracelet.
“Applause, applause, applause,” she said, doing a slow spin so that we could admire the attention to detail she'd put into her Iona cosplay.
- On top of all of these inanities, the main characters, who
were just likeable, nerdy “mixed-up kids” a
few years ago, have now become shrill, tedious,
“woke” scolds.
“Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?”
Parzival: Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She'd been DMAB—designated male at birth. … Around the same time, she'd changed her avatar's sex classification to øgender, a brand-new option GSS had added due to popular demand. People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn't limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation.
- The battles, the battles….
The rest of the Original 7ven joined the fight too. Jimmy Jam and Monte Moir each wielded a modified red Roland AXIS-1 keytar that fired sonic funk blast waves out of its neck each time a chord was played on it. Jesse Johnson fired sonic thunderbolts from the pickups of his Fender Voodoo Stratocaster, while Terry Lewis did the same with his bass, and Jellybean Johnson stood behind them, firing red lightning skyward with his drumsticks, wielding them like two magic wands. Each of the band members could also fire a deadly blast of sonic energy directly from their own mouths, just by shouting the word “Yeow!” over and over again.
“Yeow?” … Yawn.
Spoilers end here.
