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A review by thewallflower00
Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
2.0
I read the first one with an open heart, but without a critical eye. But through the years, after reading others’ takes on it, I’ve come around and no longer believe Ready Player One is the five-star delight I originally thought.
Most significant was the central theme, that being “if you obsess over something enough, you will get it”. It’s the kind of thing entitled fanboys use to ruin things like Star Wars, Rick & Morty, sports, elections. It results in cults like YouTube content creators and QAnon. They think if they sink enough time into something, there’s a reward at the bottom of the well. Like a “nice guy” who believes being nice to a girl equals points on a “sex card” that he can trade in at some point. They think that because they invest time and money into someone else’s creative work, they possess a share of it. In other words, Sam Sykes’s stages of a toxic fandom: “I love this. I own this. I control this. I can’t control this. I hate this. I must destroy this.”
Plus, the lack of diversity, the weird sex, the total absence of female perspective, and me learning what good characters, good plotting, and good writing looks like, I came into this sequel with glasses un-smudged by nostalgia. Long story short, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake of naivety with this book.
Eight years have passed between book one and book two. Years which included a dismal sophomore follow-up and a popular Stephen Spielberg movie. Mr. Cline has had plenty of time to gain perspective on his work. Develop himself as a writer. Improve his craft, his tastes. Learn the mistakes he made in the past, correct them, and grow ambition for something that exceeded his original vision. That is the hope I had coming into this.
That hope was false.
This book is much the same as the first. In fact, it feels like both the protagonist and the author haven’t learned a thing from the previous book. The pop culture references are even more unnecessary and jammed in there (no one cares that you woke up to Soul II Soul). The story and characters are the same shit as the first one. No sign that Cline learned anything or developed his skill. This could be marketing (just give them the same slop that sold last time) or it could be laziness.
It starts with summary and summary and summary. No dialogue or characterization. All showing, no telling. The story doesn’t really start until a third of the way in, just like last time. Until then, all you’re getting is setup and backstory, and it’s sad. The main character is the CEO of the world’s biggest company–basically Facebook and Nintendo combined–and all he does is play video games all day. He loses the girlfriend he made in the last book because he goes all-in to sucking more people into the virtual world he now owns. He stops talking to the real-life friends he needed in the last book, and spends all his time in the OASIS instead of running the company. It’s like he learned nothing.
For the first 33% of the book, we just follow him in his routine. The author tries to give him “Save the Cat” credit by having him give away money on education (in his VR game) and providing rigs to poor people (for his VR game). He gives so much money away I wonder how his company makes a profit.
And this is part of the virtue-signaling in the book you’ve probably already heard of. I didn’t think virtue-signaling was a real thing until I read this. I thought it was a false flag made up by reactionaries and trolls to hate on people doing good. The triggering incident I’m talking about is when the main character meets a girl he likes (in the simulation). And just like in the last book, he violates her privacy, spies on her, digs up information (this time using his CEO privileges which violate the privacy policy and could get him in jail), and discovers she was assigned male at birth.
“Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis…” Since his VR game allows him to have sex as anyone with anything, he’s realized that “passion was passion, and love was love.” Two things here. One, the fact that he’s only using gender in relation to sex (i.e. whether or not I’d do her) and not her character as a whole. And two, the author doing the same thing–using her gender status as the sole identifier of her character. This tidbit is the only thing I remember about this character. She does nothing in the story. She shows up two times, both as a “plot coupon” to help Wade out of a sticky situation. In other words, not exactly well-rounded. Virtue-signaling is when you tell people you’re “woke” without showing it through action.
So that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what’s left. The new “thing” in the story is technology created by the CEO who left the previous easter egg hunt. It’s called ONI and it’s a direct neural interface, meaning you can now touch, taste, and smell everything in the game. How the hell did this guy have time to design an expansive virtual world AND run a company from scratch (meaning marketing, management, customers, capital, facilities, etc.) AND build the hardware for the company AND architect the program the hardware would run on AND engineer the software to run on the hardware AND invent totally new equipment, in secret, that’s basically the singularity. By himself!
And like I said, the first 33% of the book is just this–setting up the book. The aftermath of winning the contest, finding the new ONI, releasing it to the public, shifting culture again so people spend even more time in a simulated world so the real world can go to pot. What reason is there to spend in reality anymore?
After all that summary the story finally starts and guess what. It’s ANOTHER Easter egg quest, designed by the founder (how did this guy have time to take a shit?). Go here, traverse the world, solve the clues, get the token. And it’s all eighties themed again. So yeah, guess what. You’re getting more of the same. Wade finds the path to one obstacle, finds the way around it (it’s not even detective work, it’s using trivia and video game powers), then moves onto the next. And everything is jammed with 80s pop culture. It makes the whole book a game of “I understood that reference.”
What is the reference Captain America understood? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
Unless you can win that game, you’re not going to have any fun. For example, they spend three chapters on the Prince planet. Prince the artist. Three chapters on Prince’s entire history.
Here’s Ready Player Two’s basic structure. Imagine a football field. Our main character is at one end and the goal is at the other. In-between there are seven blockades. All the character has to do is climb over them, one after the other, to get to the goal. Character is at point A, wants to be at point B, gets to point B without any meaningful problems or deviations that surprise the reader. The end. This is number one item in Strange Horizons’s list of stories seen too often.
A better story would involve no obstacles at first. Then, at the twenty-yard-line, an impassible wall springs up. Our character has to dig under it, or scale it, only to find murderous eagles along the way. The second barricade spans the width of the field, so he has to run through the stands, which breaks the rules and he has to avoid being seen by referees. But that presents a new problem as the audience tries to hold him back. If he gets through, the audience hates him stepping on them. And so on.
They say, in a good story, when a character is close to achieving their goal, the goalposts get pushed back. Would Mario Kart be any fun without the random items knocking you back and forth in the race? Ready Player Two is full of “and then”, “and then”, “and then”, when it should be “buts” and “therefores”.
So yeah, drop this one from your to-read lists. Cline has not demonstrated that he’s learned anything as a writer and this book feels like catering to edgelords and internet trolls that are like his characters. There was plenty of opportunity here to fix the mistakes and improve upon the first one. Change the POV character. Have multiple POV characters. Start a family to add some maturity. Go all-female version of the first book. What is it like to be the CEO of a video game company? What are the consequences of a worldwide phenomenon that’s sucking the life out of the planet? Nope, just more Willy Wonka fun & games from the 1980s.
If the theme of this book is “if you obsess over something enough, you will get it”, Cline should learn the opposite. “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”
Most significant was the central theme, that being “if you obsess over something enough, you will get it”. It’s the kind of thing entitled fanboys use to ruin things like Star Wars, Rick & Morty, sports, elections. It results in cults like YouTube content creators and QAnon. They think if they sink enough time into something, there’s a reward at the bottom of the well. Like a “nice guy” who believes being nice to a girl equals points on a “sex card” that he can trade in at some point. They think that because they invest time and money into someone else’s creative work, they possess a share of it. In other words, Sam Sykes’s stages of a toxic fandom: “I love this. I own this. I control this. I can’t control this. I hate this. I must destroy this.”
Plus, the lack of diversity, the weird sex, the total absence of female perspective, and me learning what good characters, good plotting, and good writing looks like, I came into this sequel with glasses un-smudged by nostalgia. Long story short, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake of naivety with this book.
Eight years have passed between book one and book two. Years which included a dismal sophomore follow-up and a popular Stephen Spielberg movie. Mr. Cline has had plenty of time to gain perspective on his work. Develop himself as a writer. Improve his craft, his tastes. Learn the mistakes he made in the past, correct them, and grow ambition for something that exceeded his original vision. That is the hope I had coming into this.
That hope was false.
This book is much the same as the first. In fact, it feels like both the protagonist and the author haven’t learned a thing from the previous book. The pop culture references are even more unnecessary and jammed in there (no one cares that you woke up to Soul II Soul). The story and characters are the same shit as the first one. No sign that Cline learned anything or developed his skill. This could be marketing (just give them the same slop that sold last time) or it could be laziness.
It starts with summary and summary and summary. No dialogue or characterization. All showing, no telling. The story doesn’t really start until a third of the way in, just like last time. Until then, all you’re getting is setup and backstory, and it’s sad. The main character is the CEO of the world’s biggest company–basically Facebook and Nintendo combined–and all he does is play video games all day. He loses the girlfriend he made in the last book because he goes all-in to sucking more people into the virtual world he now owns. He stops talking to the real-life friends he needed in the last book, and spends all his time in the OASIS instead of running the company. It’s like he learned nothing.
For the first 33% of the book, we just follow him in his routine. The author tries to give him “Save the Cat” credit by having him give away money on education (in his VR game) and providing rigs to poor people (for his VR game). He gives so much money away I wonder how his company makes a profit.
And this is part of the virtue-signaling in the book you’ve probably already heard of. I didn’t think virtue-signaling was a real thing until I read this. I thought it was a false flag made up by reactionaries and trolls to hate on people doing good. The triggering incident I’m talking about is when the main character meets a girl he likes (in the simulation). And just like in the last book, he violates her privacy, spies on her, digs up information (this time using his CEO privileges which violate the privacy policy and could get him in jail), and discovers she was assigned male at birth.
“Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis…” Since his VR game allows him to have sex as anyone with anything, he’s realized that “passion was passion, and love was love.” Two things here. One, the fact that he’s only using gender in relation to sex (i.e. whether or not I’d do her) and not her character as a whole. And two, the author doing the same thing–using her gender status as the sole identifier of her character. This tidbit is the only thing I remember about this character. She does nothing in the story. She shows up two times, both as a “plot coupon” to help Wade out of a sticky situation. In other words, not exactly well-rounded. Virtue-signaling is when you tell people you’re “woke” without showing it through action.
So that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what’s left. The new “thing” in the story is technology created by the CEO who left the previous easter egg hunt. It’s called ONI and it’s a direct neural interface, meaning you can now touch, taste, and smell everything in the game. How the hell did this guy have time to design an expansive virtual world AND run a company from scratch (meaning marketing, management, customers, capital, facilities, etc.) AND build the hardware for the company AND architect the program the hardware would run on AND engineer the software to run on the hardware AND invent totally new equipment, in secret, that’s basically the singularity. By himself!
And like I said, the first 33% of the book is just this–setting up the book. The aftermath of winning the contest, finding the new ONI, releasing it to the public, shifting culture again so people spend even more time in a simulated world so the real world can go to pot. What reason is there to spend in reality anymore?
After all that summary the story finally starts and guess what. It’s ANOTHER Easter egg quest, designed by the founder (how did this guy have time to take a shit?). Go here, traverse the world, solve the clues, get the token. And it’s all eighties themed again. So yeah, guess what. You’re getting more of the same. Wade finds the path to one obstacle, finds the way around it (it’s not even detective work, it’s using trivia and video game powers), then moves onto the next. And everything is jammed with 80s pop culture. It makes the whole book a game of “I understood that reference.”
What is the reference Captain America understood? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
Unless you can win that game, you’re not going to have any fun. For example, they spend three chapters on the Prince planet. Prince the artist. Three chapters on Prince’s entire history.
Here’s Ready Player Two’s basic structure. Imagine a football field. Our main character is at one end and the goal is at the other. In-between there are seven blockades. All the character has to do is climb over them, one after the other, to get to the goal. Character is at point A, wants to be at point B, gets to point B without any meaningful problems or deviations that surprise the reader. The end. This is number one item in Strange Horizons’s list of stories seen too often.
A better story would involve no obstacles at first. Then, at the twenty-yard-line, an impassible wall springs up. Our character has to dig under it, or scale it, only to find murderous eagles along the way. The second barricade spans the width of the field, so he has to run through the stands, which breaks the rules and he has to avoid being seen by referees. But that presents a new problem as the audience tries to hold him back. If he gets through, the audience hates him stepping on them. And so on.
They say, in a good story, when a character is close to achieving their goal, the goalposts get pushed back. Would Mario Kart be any fun without the random items knocking you back and forth in the race? Ready Player Two is full of “and then”, “and then”, “and then”, when it should be “buts” and “therefores”.
So yeah, drop this one from your to-read lists. Cline has not demonstrated that he’s learned anything as a writer and this book feels like catering to edgelords and internet trolls that are like his characters. There was plenty of opportunity here to fix the mistakes and improve upon the first one. Change the POV character. Have multiple POV characters. Start a family to add some maturity. Go all-female version of the first book. What is it like to be the CEO of a video game company? What are the consequences of a worldwide phenomenon that’s sucking the life out of the planet? Nope, just more Willy Wonka fun & games from the 1980s.
If the theme of this book is “if you obsess over something enough, you will get it”, Cline should learn the opposite. “Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”