Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much.
Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own, but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today.
Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like The Matirx or Total Recall. Ready Player One had just enough reality worked in to make it seem like a glimpse into the future. It’s not the pure fantasy of Star Trek’s Holodeck or being being sucked into a video game like TRON.
Which brings us along to Ready Player Two.
I listened to the audio book version read by
Our story picks up right after the happy ending of Ready Player One. Wade, Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto are all now rich beyond their wildest dreams and are no longer the innocent heroes we once knew. The world shrinks. Innovative Online Industries, the main bad guys in the first book, are destroyed by Wade and become just another wholly owned subsidiary of Gregarious Simulation Systems. Without any real world challenges, our heroes have to deal with a virtual enemy, the avatar Anorak, left behind by James Halliday.
We once again follow our heroes as they solve a number of quests, follow a number of clues, meet a few new people to help them and face the moral dilemma of what to do once they complete the quest for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul.
There is a lot of telling and not showing.
It’s kind of hard to relate to Wade and company now that they are all richer than god. They also treat The Oasis like their own personal playground. There’s also something not quite right about Anorak as the villain. I mean, yeah, he does a few evil things, but it’s always implied that he’s not really evil, he’s just drawn that way.
Ready Player One is a classic example of a book that doesn’t need a sequel. But I can’t blame Ernest Cline for wanting another paycheck. There are a lot of fun elements here. It’s another geek fest featuring even more obscure references to the 1970s and 1980s.
The whole threat of impending doom that takes up the last half of the book never generated any tension for me. I also hated the whole break up just to get back together later theme that ran through the whole book.
Ready Player Two was still worth reading. Just don’t expect it to be up there with Ready Player One.
