Ready Player Two (2020)

I will admit that, when I read Ready Player One, I mostly found it fine. As an adventure story, it moved well and was fun. That said, there was a lot about the book that bothered me at least a little. Much of it seemed to be a lot of author Ernie Cline using intellectual property from all over pop culture, and most of it came from the 80s. I lived through and 80s, and quite frankly, I don’t really miss the 80s. Remembering the past is fine, but I am firm believer in living in the present. An entire future society that worshiped a single decade in human history sounded like a society where growth was completely stunted. And the way Cline’s narrator Wade Watts kept referring to the rather average stuff of my childhood as “classics” and such made me want to roll my eyes many times over. Plus, how much am I supposed to worry about people dying in a video game? Ultimately, there were no real stakes.

However, there is a sequel, and I did read it. Will I like Ready Player Two more than I did the original novel?

Picking up, sort of, not long after the original novel ended, we learn narrator Wade has become something of a shut-away after a fight with girlfriend Samantha (that he says he is still in love with in ways that make me wonder if he knows what love really is) while his other two friends Aech and Shoto go do their own thing as the foursome continues to run the massive company that owns the OASIS, the virtual reality that apparently contains all of geek culture that hasn’t been created since 2020. Samantha has some real issues with a new piece of technology that Wade and the others introduced to the general public, and things ate consistently tense in corporate HQ. The discovery of this technology also brought in a brand new quest, this time to locate something to do with Kira Morrow, Og Morrow’s late wife and the unwilling object of James Halliday’s affections. As it is, this quest becomes much more a matter of life and death, so can Wade get his friends to work together and solve the next round of puzzles for, well, this other Easter egg?

OK, first off, as much as I will admit to more or less enjoying the original book, it still bugged me on a number of levels. Wade Watts isn’t much of a protagonist. He’s utterly bland and forgettable. And quite frankly, the way this thing was set up, the reward went to Wade based on his knowledge of pop culture and not based on what kind of person he might be. That’s a bit of a problem. As it is, Cline’s book seemed to go to out of its way to remind me of all the things from the first book I didn’t like, as once again, Wade goes on a quest through a lot of old pop culture, the big difference here being it’s based on pop culture I have very little knowledge in, or in the case of a popular filmmaker, someone whose work I don’t even like all that much.

And, all I saw, was for the third time Cline is writing the same basic book: some guy with a passion for a dead person’s pop culture goes on some kind of mission that is based around some old pop culture ideas. Yes, I am including Cline’s other book, Armada, in that category. To Cline’s credit, he does at least attempt to answer the criticisms of his first work. However, he does so in ways that are at times creepy and other times clearly not very well thought out. There’s a technology that allows people to upload and share experiences in this book, and Cline makes note that mothers are sharing the birth of their children so their kids can, in the future, experience their own birth as their own mother.

And I honestly thought…why would anyone want to do that?

That may be more or less why I can’t really get into this series. I really don’t care what happens to the OASIS. It’s really hard to feel bad for people who die, not in reality, but in a video game. The OASIS, well, isn’t real. As it is, even with a ticking clock here, I never felt like anyone was in real danger. That was true before, and it’s true now. Factor in as well that Wade, who starts off the book as possibly the worst kind of rich guy and video game player, gets more or less back in everyone’s good graces without really trying at all, and there’s a book here that has no real consequences.

If anything, the last section might be where Cline tries to do something new, show he learned something, and it still doesn’t work. I mean, literally, I looked over the last chapter and thought “That isn’t really how that works.”

Now, this isn’t the worst book I have ever read. But it was a book full of characters I don’t care about involved in a quest I didn’t really care about to save a virtual reality that really wasn’t anything I cared about. There never seemed to be any weight to anything, and everything turned out OK for Wade without his really learning much or having to put too much effort into being a better person. He just is. Now, if Cline can write a book that doesn’t use old pop culture as a crutch, he might actually get somewhere as a writer. I think he can, but he has to try first.

Grade: C-