A Review of Ready Player Two
Imagine a world where all your wildest dreams have come true and you find yourself asking, “Now what?” That is what I have to believe much of the inhabitants of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two‘s world were thinking. To set the scene I must assume you have watched the movie or read the book Ready Player One. Just after the events of that novel the world is rocked by the discovery of a technology developed years prior by “Gregarious Simulation Systems” the fictional company founded by the eccentric billionaire James Halliday. The company, under his leadership, designed, built, and tested an experimental technology called the “ONI”. Now, neatly sidestepping the fact that the acronym literally refers to a kind of demon from Japanese myth, as the book also sidesteps this fact, there are a lot of benefits to this technology. The “OASIS Neural Interface” does exactly what it sounds like, it interfaces with the neural network of the user and transplants their consciousness into the Oasis, the fictional Super-Game world that hosts the bulk of the stories in both Ready Player One and Ready Player Two. With this technology users are able to record experiences they have in the real world and upload them to the “ONI-Net”, where other users can experience their life as if they were them. Like a more in-depth version of those Meta-Glasses Instagram/Facebook reels we have today.
The story follows Wade Watts, reprising his role as the protagonist from the first novel, who struggles with the vice of fortune and the ultimate power he has in the OASIS as its new god. All of his old teammates, at least the ones that survived the last novel, are there too. All of them adopt the new technology except Samantha, Wade’s girlfriend from the last book. They have a large fight over it and breakup due to differences in how they see this new technology. When the ONI reached 7,777,777 users a new quest was announced. This was a quest to find the Siren’s Soul. What new adventures will Wade go on to find the seven shards and once again make the siren whole? Who is the Siren? Who will stand in his way?
The quest takes over a year to get anywhere. Wade, having lost his way as a pure-hearted gunter (that is an Easter Egg Hunter), has offered a bounty of One Billion USD to anyone who leads him to the first of these seven mystical shards. Little does he know that when he finds the first of the seven he will awaken a threat that no one saw coming. Halliday, or rather his avatar Anorak, is back from the grave and has corrupted the Firmware of the ONI devices with the intent off holding the world hostage until he gets what he wants, the Siren.
Wade and his friends have to once again join forces and use their unique specialties as gunters to track down the other six shards still yet to be found by Halliday’s Heir (who we learn is validly interpreted as EITHER Wade or Halliday’s best friend Ogden Morrow). And they only have about twelve-hours to do it otherwise their brains will start to overload and they, along with 500 million other users of the ONI headsets will die.This is a race against time. However that doesn’t excuse things that the book does to waste that time.
Before the quest even gets going we are subjected to the author telling us how the ONI-Net has changed the world’s perspective on sexuality and gender. Which, mindbogglingly boils down to, “Well the porn of the ONI-Net has so warped our collective brains that things like transgenderism, gender fluidity, and homosexual sex are normal now.” How this concept got past the censors at Penguin, I have no idea. The ironic reality of it is astounding. This is in-part what the “right” has been claiming for years, is that the open sexuality the internet has invented has caused the warping of the minds of people and especially children causing the severe uptick we’ve seen in degenerate life-styles in recent decades. That the book just outright has the main character admit all of this, is nuts and costs the book a half star. Not that I would have preferred it hidden. It just was entirely unnecessary and should have been omitted from the book entirely. Stop trying to force gender politics into everything and let adventure stories be about the adventure and not the genitals of the heroes.
The next two things that cost the book entire stars is Aech’s racism. The black, queer, butch, gender-confused character Aech returns from the first book to reprise her role as the voice for black people, I guess… I’m not even sure. Really she is there to get the hero through the puzzle that regards the artist formerly known as Prince. The entire quest that involves the Prince of Pop, is annoying because we spend a ton of time talking about this one character from pop-culture history and how much he meant to people like Aech. Which would have all been fine, IF WE WEREN’T ON A PLANETARY CLOCK. This book would have done much better if we got these moments as post-commentary from the characters remembering their time fighting against the clock. But we don’t instead we spend hours hearing about Aech’s sob-story while 500-million lives are at stake. I would erase both of these contentions if at any point Wade was like, “Hey, Aech, that sounds like a lot, but can we focus up and talk about that later?” But he never does. He is a good liberal white guy and lets the black woman speak ignoring the 500-million lives that are at stake. Another thing, if it was all the character Aech being horrible, I might have been able to ignore it. But it’s the book, aka the author, letting her be horrible with which I have the biggest bone to pick.
Before the Prince Planet quest, they have to go to a planet filled with recreations of the different areas and settings of the John Hughes movies from the 80s and 90s. I am a huge fan of these but apparently we needed to hear about how much Aech doesn’t like them. She calls the stands of fans at a football game a field of dandelions at one point which is horribly racist against all of the white bystanders. “Oh but come on, A.B., that’s just a character being horrible right?” I hear you saying. And I say no. It is the author picking and choosing what kinds of racism he deems “acceptable.” In the very next arc, when they land on the Prince planet another character in the party makes a joke at the expense of the artist formerly know as, and how does the book react? By literally ‘deus ex machina’-ing a lightning bolt out of the sky and nearly striking the character dead. So all of Aech’s real racism is ignored and played off, but a joke, made by another character, gets him a near-death sentence… that checks out, unfortunately.
Then, the book commits the same sin again and lets Aech be racist against hobbits, dwarves, and elves in Tolkien’s world of The Lord of the Rings. While we are STILL racing against time… That did it for me. The author shot himself in the foot too many time for me to give him anything about a two-star rating.
The conclusion of the book was really fun, actually. It asks a lot of interesting philosophical questions in a unique way and kept my attention until the closing page.
As for my rating, lets give it a two-star rating, and I’m being generous. If you recall from my previous review, any cursing uncensored will automatically reduce the rating the book receives. But when it comes to the debauchery here in Ready Player Two the cursing is only scratching the surface. The book also contains references to porn of all stripes, transgenderism, and is severely racist against white people and our American culture of the 80’s. Because of all this the rating falls all the way down to two stars. The only thing that saved it from being my first ever one star rated book, is the appreciation it shows towards it’s ancestors like Lord of the Rings and John Hughes movies. I would not recommend this book to anyone. Which is hard to say because I remember enjoying it last time I read it…oh well.