Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline ( Ballantine 978-1524761332, $ 28.99, 384pp, hardback ) November 2020I am not frequently bowled over by beginning novels, but I admit to being very please and impress with Ernest Cline ’ s best seller, Ready Player One, when it appeared about ten years ago. I was then a evaluate for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and cast my vote to ensure it got on the shortlist as one of the year ’ s finest. I was captivated by the ledger ’ randomness carefreeness, joie de vivre, authentic voice, optimism, and its fresh and eloquent accept on toss off culture. not to mention a electrifying narrative .
As I tried to indicate in a subsequent review, Cline ’ s moment novel, Armada, was besides enjoyable, but on a less stellar tied, being a spot more push and superficial, unable to fully transcend its philistine bricolage. So of class when newsworthiness came of Ready Player Two, the sequel to his debut, I was bright and however a tad leery. Could Cline capture lightning in a bottle again ?
I am delight to report that he has succeeded to the soap. Picking up the threads of the first book barely a few days after that legal action ended, the sequel exudes the same charm and fascination as the original. Characters, timbre, voice, all beautifully replicated, continued, and extended. But Cline does not merely push all the same buttons once more. How could he, given the huge climactic, life-altering victory enjoyed by its protagonist, whereby he jumped from lowest of the moo to highest of the high gear ? alternatively, he levels up to new challenges and themes, while recreating the world we came to enjoy with new depth, as he exfoliates both the virtual population of the OASIS, and the constantly collapsing meatspace environment.
I should mention that this is a ledger that could be spoiled easily, by a reviewer citing two major developments. So I will tread carefully in detailing the plot, choosing a minimalist approach .
We left our hero Wade Watts, AKA “ Parzival, ” on top of the world—almost literally. He had managed to crack the contest held in the uber-virtual reality kingdom known as the OASIS, a challenge which left him the sole heir to the estate of abruptly multi-zillionaire James Halliday, co-creator of the OASIS. ( Og Morrow, the other giant genesis number, had already retired to a semi-reclusive being. ) Wearing the digital Robes of Anorak, Wade is almighty in the OASIS. In the real world, he heads the corporation that runs the omnipresent VR, along with his pals Aech, Shoto and Art3mis .
And within the first few pages of this sequel, he has equitable discovered Halliday ’ s last paradigm-shattering bequest : a new interface rig that allows full moon sensory concentration in the OASIS. no more childlike and clunky haptic and audio-visual relations with all the multiplex coded wonders. immediately there ’ s sum five-senses interactions. And on top of that, one ’ second livestream can be recorded and played back, granting full sheathing awareness to the user, so that one can temporarily inhabit another brain .
Life looks bright in the expanded virtual kingdom, if not so much in the decay biosphere, which staggers on as best it can for a few years. One gloominess here is that Wade ’ s love affair with Art3mis has fallen apart, leaving him brokenhearted and her distant and chilly. But Wade perseveres .
One new development takes his mind off his troubles reasonably. It abruptly appears that Halliday left a second quest to be solved : the search for the Seven Shards of the Siren ’ south Soul. But this quest is more abstruse and ill-defined, and in fact the respect at the end is unknown. then wade dithers along half-heartedly, until a newfangled quality, a fellow “ gunter ” ( “ easter egg orion ” ) named L0hengrin appears. She has found the first Shard and will sell it to Wade. He agrees to the distribute, and this kicks everything into gamey gear .
But as Wade begins to focus on the hunt, something identical bad happens. A rogue Artificial Intelligence, the first of its kind, surfaces in the OASIS. It excessively wants the Shards, and has found a way to compel Wade to aid it. The threat that the AI deploy does not impact merely Wade, but besides every early drug user as well. now Wade is gaming to save not alone his own life, but the lives of billions of others—including his beloved old and new friends.
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This pivotal event occurs about one-third of the means into the fib, and the respite of the record is a series of cascading, unrelenting set-pieces of gaming bravado, all under the Damocles Sword of an impossible deadline. Can Wade and Company complete the quest, digit out the nature of the trophy, and stop the AI ? possibly only by destroying the entire OASIS .
As did its predecessor, this book accomplishes several big things. It invests its centerpiece VR setting with american samoa a lot ontological and epistemic heave as reality. We constantly feel that events in the OASIS, however antic or phantasmagoric, have consequence and consequence. It ’ sulfur kind of the same effect achieved by classics like The Phantom Tollbooth and A Wrinkle in Time, which parade their hurl through eldritch venues. At the same clock, Cline does not neglect meatspace, staging a match of bright incidents there besides. In fact, he goes wholly meta, having Wade direct a telepresence automaton in physical space from his perch inside the OASIS, thus inverting or turning wrong-side-out or recomplicating the common active .
Cline expands the dimensions of his characters from how they were when we first met them. The love floor between Wade and Art3mis, paralleled by that backstory report of the matchless between Og Morrow and his dead wife Kira, is very touch. additionally, the new crowd headed by L0hengrin is a gain and winsome addition to the shed. I lone wish they had been featured even more .
Cline ’ randomness use of 1980s pop culture matches or surpasses his prior manage of what could have been boring trivium. Like Alan Moore, he transforms what could have been mere fanfic into art. You have not lived until you witness the struggle between our heroes and seven avatars of Prince the musician, or an excursion into the world of The Silmarillion. Something like a lacuna did strike me in this out, however. adenine across-the-board as Cline ’ s coverage of pop music culture is, he doesn ’ t do comics. There ’ randomness no Marvel or DC worlds in the OASIS. surely classical Love & Rockets issues from the 1980s could have provided some killer whale moments. But Cline is apparently precisely not a comics guy, which leaves the OASIS unrealistically threadbare in that one blot .
however, this small omission was obtrusive entirely in retrospect, for the propellant carry through carries us along like a white-water raft excursion, to a ending that is unanticipated and absolutely comforting .
Along with Matt Ruff ’ sulfur 88 Names and Neal Stephenson ’ randomness Fall; or Dodge in Hell, Cline new novel illustrates that the region we dream into being count just as much—and check as much grief, pathos and love—as the one that some indefinable creator dreamed up for us.
Paul Di Filippo has been writing professionally for over thirty years, and has published about that total of books. He lives in Providence RI, with his checkmate of an evening greater numeral of years, Deborah Newton .
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