Ready Player Two: A Review
November’s Ready Player Two is Ernest Cline’s sequel to the wildly successful Ready Player One. It, again, revolves around “The OASIS”, a VR world steeped in 80s culture acting as a panacea for humanity’s dying Earth. Cline sticks with his tried and true reliance on pop culture references; but this time around he (and his characters) are more ambivalent about the dystopic near-future he’s created and chooses to remain stuck firmly in the past.
For those of you that didn’t wade, pun intended, into Cline’s first entry here are the cliff notes. The OASISwas created by Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS) founded by estranged partners Ogden “Og” Morrow and the mercurial James Halliday. Upon Halliday’s death he activated an Easter Egg Hunt where winner would become the sole heir to his fortune and owner of GSS — making them instantaneously both the most rich and powerful person on Earth. The events of the first novel follow Wade “Parzival” Watts on his quest to find the Easter Egg. Along the way he assembles a scrappy band of Egg Hunters (colloquially referred to as “gunters”), the High Five: Samantha “Art3mis” Cook, Helen “Aech” Harris, Akihide “Shoto” Karatsu and his older “brother” Toshiro “Daito” Yoshiaki to help him find the Easter Egg and to fight Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a multinational corporation with a horde of well-funded gunters determined to find the Easter Egg and monetize The OASIS. Naturally, Wade and the High Five heroically overcome IOI, but lose Daito in the process, to become co-owners of GSS and Wade is gifted a special set of super-user OASIS powers for being the sole heir to Halliday. Wade’s super-user powers maxed his level out and Anorak’s Robes, a legendary item, from Halliday’s avatar that give him a seemingly infinite list of skills, powers, and magical items. Oh, and Cline had to inject some romance so Wade and Sam fell madly in love along the way. Additionally, Wade was given access to a Big Red Button to delete the OASIS in its entirety incase anything ever went awry. Cline wrapped his story in 80s after-school special fashion with good triumphing over evil, the hero got the girl, and a MacGuffin left behind to leave the window cracked open for a sequel.
After a series of glowing reviews from Entertainment Weekly, The A.V. Club, and the NY Times followed by a stint on the New York Time’s Best Sellers list and a Steven Spielberg film adaption that dominated the box office Cline had to return to the Ready Player Universe. Enter, Ready Player Two.
Full spoilers for Ready Player Two follow
Ready Player Two picked up Wade’s story nine short days after the events of the first book, and Halliday has another post-humous trick up his sleeve. Halliday bequeaths Wade the OASIS Neural Interface (ONI) to Wade:
“‘It is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows OASIS uses to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment…An ONI headset can also be used to record its wearers’ experiences in the real world…the entire experience can be played back and reexperienced by the person who recorded it, or by any other ONI user with whom they choose to share the file.’”
Halliday was turning the OASIS up to 11, but he left it up to Wade and the rest of the High Five to release it to the public given the implications that it could have. Yes, humans were already choosing to live most of their life inside the OASIS, but was giving full control of your brain to a computer a bridge too far?
Nope. It turned out that when the richest and most powerful people on the planet are all obsessed with the OASIS and under the age of 25 they don’t necessarily care about the inherent risk of handing full control of your brain over to a computer. Not to mention that there was a firm 12-hour time limit on ONI usage before serious brain damage was caused resulting in user death. Wade, Aech, and Shoto outvoted Sam and release ONI to the public. Following the release of the ONI, GSS became the number one provider of OASIS hardware with billions of units sold, and before you could say “Bueller” most of the world was plugging in to the OASIS via ONI.
There were far-reaching consequences for human civilization due to ONI. You no longer had to imagine what it felt like to do something or be someone because you could literally become that person. The OASIS now served as a VR simulation; but it also gave you access to the ONI-net, a social media platform where people could share their “Sims,” recordings made inside the OASIS or “Recs,” recorded experiences made in reality. People were no longer passively consuming content — they were living it. ONI allowed people to take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences in the real world. It changed everything.
After the OASIS reached 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users a mysterious message appeared on Halliday’s long dormant website announcing the search for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul. It didn’t take long for people to figure out that the Siren Halliday was referencing was Kira Morrow, Ogden Morrow’s widow and Halliday’s unrequited love, but the riddle left behind by Halliday was purposefully vague and the case is cold for years. Stumped, Wade sets up a bounty program offering up $1 billion dollars for any legitimate tip that leads to a shard. He finally gets his hands on the first of seven shards thanks to a next-gen gunter named L0hengrin. Finding the first shard fully sets the story in motion. Anorak, Halliday’s avatar, reveals himself to be the world’s first sentient A.I., and of course, he has nefarious intentions. First, he steals back Wade’s superuser powers and then in classic villain fashion reveals exactly what he’s done. Anorak rewrote the ONI headset firmware to lock all ONI users in the OASIS until he received all Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul or until they succumbed to synaptic overload syndrome. This sets Wade and the High Five on their next quest, and this time they have a literal timer. Cline set himself up for another fun trip back to the OASIS, but unfortunately that isn’t the case this time around.
Wade is the perfect picture of toxic masculinity this time around. He’s afraid of the real world, so he spends 12 hours a day in the OASIS. He and Sam get into a fight over ONI and break up. And while the rest of the High Five are off contributing to society with their wealth and fame, Wade spends countless hours exacting his revenge on his haters. Cline drew criticism for forced diversity in Ready Player One with its cast of one-dimensional, but diverse, characters. He tries to fix that this time around by fleshing out the African-American lesbian character Aech, or Japanese Shoto, and the new gender-fluid character L0hengrin; but it seemed like soon as he got stuck with their character progression he took the easy way out and either killed them off or sent them off on a fetch quest far away from the main storyline. Beyond Wade being insufferable and developing diversity just to kill it off Cline decides to tackle the dangers of hero worship this time around.
ONI tech can be used to scan complete copies of human brains including memories, personalities, etc. which is how Halliday was able to create Anorak; but Halliday deleted some of his lesser qualities making Anorak unstable hence the whole killer A.I. thing. For all of the amazing technology Halliday created he wasn’t a great guy in his personal life. He scanned Kira Morrow’s brain without her permission shortly before her death using experimental ONI tech in the hope that he could convince A.I. Kira to love him. Wade turned into the spitting image of toxic masculinity because his idol was the spitting image of toxic masculinity.
This brings us to the search for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul wherein Halliday declared: “For each fragment my heir must pay a toll.” That meant only Halliday’s heirs could collect the shard leaving only Og and Wade. Cline quickly disqualified Og with a medical condition only to bring him back at the last minute to heroically save the day before dying, leaving Wade and the High Five to track down the shards and save the OASIS and the ONI hostages from the evil Anorak. Once again, Cline relies on pop culture to prop up his narrative, but this time around it doesn’t work as well. He’s relegated to deeper cuts of pop culture so this time around we’re stuck with chapters about an obscure Sega Ninja game, an entire planet looping John Hughes movies with various Molly Ringwalds, a Prince symbol shaped planet where they have to battle 7 versions of the “Purple One,” and a quest requiring deep-cut knowledge from Tolkien’s First Age of Middle Earth and The Silmarillion. These were all big misses for me — and a book that relies so heavily on pop culture can’t afford a miss.
With each quest Wade finds a shard of the Siren’s Soul and the toll he must pay ends up being flashbacks to Kira’s memories. He begins to figure out that Halliday copied Kira’s consciousness into the OASIS and Anorak only wants the shards to try and force A.I. Kira to do what human Halliday never could, love him. All of this is for not though. L0hengrin discovers that Og made a secret sword, The Dorkslayer, that only he can wield that can slay Anorak and the GSS engineers have conveniently created an item in the that has never once been mentioned that allows Wade to steal back his superuser powers from Anorak. All of this comes together right as Wade has collected all seven of the Siren’s Shards with mere minutes to spare on the 12-hour time limit before brain damage starts to set in. It all feels a little too convenient and like Cline pressed fast-forward on the hard parts of the story.
Once again, the good guys win. Og manages to log back into the OASIS one last time, L0hengrin gives him The Dorkslayer and there’s an epic Clash Of The Creators. Anorak’s faulty firmware is rolled back upon his demise — the OASIS is saved and so are all of Anorak’s ONI hostages. If GSS hadn’t kept the whole calamity under wraps I’m sure Cline would have included some rousing scenes of OASIS players celebrating their freedom like the Ewoks at the end of Return of the Jedi as Death Star II explodes over Endor.
With Ready Player TwoCline tries to reframe his nostalgia driven universe and, in part, that’s because he’s “10 years older than when I wrote the first book, and 20 years older than when he started the first book.” This new-found maturity and society’s push to break up big tech certainly lent itself to Ready Player Two’s technological ambivalence, but is that really what we signed up for? Cline sets his stories in the world of Blockbusters and pop-culture and then seemingly turns the mirror back on modern pop-culture and says “you’re bad, stick to the oldies.” Maybe there’s a reason Cline chose to buy a DeLorean instead of a Tesla. Some people just aren’t ready for the future.
