Why "Ready Player Two" is Worse than its Predecessor in Virtually Every Way.
Something that bothers me in book criticism is when people seem to be unable to accept that the flaws in a protagonist may be considered flaws by the author. It is frustrating as a writer because creating a character who has flaws, says stupid things, and makes mistakes is the core of good fiction. But at some point you have to point out that their flaws. And you can’t have everything work out because of the things they did that were wrong. In this way, “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline is a bit complicated. The book is told from the point of view of a teenage boy, so the views in the book should reflect that of a teenage boy. But that doesn’t excuse everything in the book, that has some problems. “Ready Player Two” is interesting because the author is clearly aware of those criticisms of his previous book and has attempted to fix those. But he added far worse problems and ones that he once again failed to address while also recycling the plot from the last book, but doing it worse.
What happens in Ready Player Two
The individual beats of much of this story are its weakest part of the novel. There are sections that are far too long about trivia and fandom simply for the sake of exploring that. This is true in some ways of “Ready Player One” but those felt like important adventures and often were more connected to the plot than they at first seemed.
The best example of this was their visit to a world based around the singer Prince. It allowed for some small bits of character growth, but mostly it existed to talk about Prince and didn’t really move the story forward. The reason I point that out is to say I won’t be going into great detail about the specifics of the story but spoiling the overriding ideas and skipping much of the minutia.
The story starts a few months or perhaps a year after “Ready Player One”. A few important things have happened. The ones most important to the plot are that Wade discovers a technology Halliday had created that will change the Oasis. Basically, he created a way to connect your brain directly to the Oasis. You fall into what is effectively a coma and experience the Oasis as if it were real. You can see, taste and touch things in far more detail than you could otherwise. This causes the two other problems. First, Art3mis is against releasing this technology, seeing it as even more problematic for the world than the Oasis already is. The other three voting members of the high five disagree and vote to release it. This along with a major argument causes a breakup between Wade and Samantha.
More than that, when 777,777 are simultaneously on the Oasis I the new ONI rigs it triggers a new quest. This time to gather seven shards of the siren’s soul. What exactly this means isn’t clear, but again people search only this time the only one who can actually interact with the quest pieces is Wade. I liked the quest aspect of the first book. I did not in the second. It felt far too much like a rerun and one that was inferior in a number of ways. The most important being that it didn’t feel organic. That made it far less believable than a book like “Hunger Games” that did the same thing, but was at least based on a recurring event.
What makes this a bit more interesting is that shortly after Wade finally finds the first shard, thanks to a new character that feels as if she should be important but ends up being extremely underdeveloped, an AI of Halliday takes over the Oasis trapping everyone who is wearing an ONI headset inside without the ability to log out. Giving the entire book a twelve hour clock because if you’re in the ONI over twelve hours, it will damage your brain.
They rush through the quests. I suspect this was supposed to make everything feel more important, but what it did was make me annoyed whenever they were wasting time doing things that could otherwise be fun to watch them do. At first they are collecting the shards while trying to figure out how to stop the rogue AI, but eventually they learn that what they are collecting is the key to unlocking Oggs dead wife’s AI. This is because it turns out that not only is the IOI able to scan your brain to allow you to interact directly with the Oasis, but it can also make a copy of your brain. This is something that Halliday did to her before she died and his AI is convinced he can make her love him even though she was the same person who hadn’t fallen in love with him before.
This leads to the conclusion that I will leave mostly ambiguous, but to say that the ability to create AI versions of people is a major technology that would change everything, and Ernest Cline doesn’t ignore that.
What I thought of “Ready Player Two”
I enjoyed “Ready Player Two” by Ernest Cline more than I should have. I like Wil Wheaton who read the audio book and I like enough of the ideas, and I’m able to largely ignore flaws in books if I try. More than that, I knew what it was when I started. I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece of prose or a hugely deep book. I was expecting an adventure book set in virtual reality with plenty of nostalgia. But this book got me to where many people were after the first book, frustrated by the nostalgia and annoyed with the characters. If you loved “Ready Player One” you’ll probably be OK with this, though it isn’t as good, but if you disliked it the first time, then there is nothing here to that is going to change your mind.