Ready Player One/Ready Player Two - 2011/2020 Novels (Ernest Cline)

Ready Player One is a science fiction adventure novel released in 2011.

Set in 2045, with society and the economy in terminal meltdown through global warming and an energy crisis, it tells the story of Wade Watts, a teenager living with his Aunt in the ‘stacks’ in Columbus, Ohio; a huge slum area made up of thousands of mobile homes stacked precariously. To escape the grim reality of the real world, most people spend as much time as possible inside the Oasis; a free virtual reality (VR) world created by James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, gaming innovators and founders of Gregarious Games. The Oasis, accessed using a VR headset and special ‘Haptic’ gloves, is made up of thousands of fantasy worlds where, once logged in, the user can go wherever, be whoever and do whatever they want.

The story starts with the announcement of the death of Halliday and the revelation that he has hidden an Easter Egg deep inside the Oasis which can be found by collecting three keys, achieved by solving a series of clues and

puzzles. The person that finds the egg will win Halliday’s majority share and overall control of the Oasis. As Halliday grew up in the 1980s, most of the puzzles and tasks relate to the pop’ culture of the era, with numerous references to the music, films, television programmes and video games that defined the decade.

Wade (or Parzival, as his Oasis avatar is known) along with all others dedicated to the search for the egg are known as ‘gunters’, short for egg-hunters. We follow his journey along with his Oasis friends: Aech, Shoto and Daito. Along the way he develops a friendship with Art3mis (pronounced Art-e-mis), on whom he has had a cyber-crush for many years. They are determined to reach the ultimate goal before Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a large internet conglomerate led by stereotypical bad-guy Nolan Sorento, who wants to gain control of the Oasis to monetise it. They are battling against the odds however as IOI has an army of gunters, known as Sixers, so-named because their avatars have no names, just serial numbers beginning with a ‘6’.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging story, which will be particularly appreciated by those of a certain age that have fond memories of the films, music, television shows and in particular the explosion of video gaming in the 1980s. The references come thick and fast, giving the impression that the author is either an utter uber-geek or literally spent years researching the decade before getting the final story down.

The book led to a film adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg. The crux of the plot remained the same, but significant artistic licence was taken to adapt the story to the big screen; for example, rather than a three-hour game of 1980’s video game Joust to win the first key (which perhaps understandably wouldn’t hold a cinema audience on the edge of their seats), Wade has to finish a huge computer-game style motor-race across New York resembling Mario Kart on acid, complete with gigantic jumps, massive crashes and attacks from the likes of the Jurassic Park T-Rex and King Kong.

The film is worth checking out, being spectacular and a lot of fun (it is Spielberg after all), but for me the book is better. It’s a terrific read and, while it isn’t Dickens or Orwell, it’s a clever and thoroughly entertaining and engaging story, well told with good pace and a satisfying ending.

So I was really excited to get my hands on the sequel; Ready Player Two, which was released in 2020 (WARNING - review contains first book spoilers).

Continuing from just after the conclusion of the original story, Wade, Aech, Art3mis and Shoto now jointly run the Oasis. Wade has inherited a new technology (ONI) from James Halliday, which allows the user to enjoy the Oasis in all five senses and to record and share their experiences, making it enormously addictive. However ONI can only be used for twelve hours before a user must log out to avoid brain damage. Despite major reservations from Art3mis, a majority decision is made to release ONI to the public.

Once sufficient numbers of ONI headsets are in use, Wade is then forced into another hunt by the now apparently evil avatar of Halliday, who reveals that Ogden Morrow (Halliday’s ex-best friend and business

partner) has been captured in real life and is being tortured by Nolan Sorento; Wade’s nemesis from the first novel. This time Wade has to find the ‘seven shards’ in a bid to resurrect the ‘Siren's Soul’, thus giving Halliday another chance to be with his lifelong love - Keira, the deceased wife of Morrow. As an added incentive, Halliday reveals that he has locked all ONI users into the Oasis and won’t release them until Wade has completed the task, effectively giving him twelve hours to save the world from mass brain damage and death.

There is always a risk with a sequel. Sometimes they get absolutely nailed (in the world of cinema, Terminator 2 and Aliens are examples where a terrific first offering was lifted to even greater heights by the second instalment), but too often you get a feeling that the creator had exhausted all their good ideas the first time around and the follow up can feel forced, rushed and less than satisfying; the dreaded ‘second album’ syndrome. Which was this to be?

I won’t mess about as this is, unfortunately, the dreaded second album. I absolutely loved the first story, but I struggled to connect with this one. While still based around the same characters, set predominantly in the Oasis and rammed full with even more ‘80s references than you can shake a Rubik’s Cube at, this time it simply doesn’t work nearly so well.

Firstly, I found the story somewhat unsatisfying. Despite this being a fantasy sci-fi tale where almost anything is possible, there were times where I felt that the level of suspension of disbelief required was still too much. We have to believe in characters from the first story who appeared to have undergone personality transplants. We are asked to accept without any rational explanation that the user can use an ONI for twelve hours without any ill-effects, but if they exceed this time limit then they will suddenly incur brain damage. The fact that Wade is given a full twelve hours to complete the task infers that every single one of the billions of ONI users in the Oasis has literally only just logged on, which is clearly ridiculous. We are supposed to believe that the majority of the shards remained undiscovered for years, but it is apparently conceivable that, once Halliday's threat has been made, Wade can be expected to collect them all in just twelve hours. It’s all too much. I found that the flow and feel of the first book had been lost, with a less focussed story that doesn’t make the best of the characters we know, but which introduces new characters that I cared little about. If I am honest, by the time I was three quarters of the way through I wasn’t bothered whether Wade succeeded or not, I just wanted to finish the book. And that’s not a ringing endorsement.

The pop’ culture references, while fun and appropriate in the original story, felt over-laboured and forced this time around. It may just be a matter of chance that the references resonated with me in the first instalment and didn’t in the second. As an example, in Ready Player One there were puzzles set around the Joust, Adventure and Pac Man games (which I have played) and the War Games and Monty Python and the Holy Grail films (which I have seen). In this story there is a huge section set in Ridgemont High with lots of references to the John Hughes films (I haven’t seen any) and there is a long and rather bizarre section describing in unending detail a battle against multiple Princes (I have never been a huge fan of his music). Perhaps it was simply that I couldn’t relate, but it seemed that Cline was desperately seeking to recreate that feeling of warm nostalgia that enveloped the first story, but for me at least, failed to hit the mark this time around.

But the biggest complaint I have is in the actual writing. Some authors I can read easily, whereas I find others to be hard work. I found Ready Player One to be an easy book to read. The sequel on the other hand was more difficult, with the difference in writing style being quite noticeable; in fact, there were times when it almost felt as if it could have been penned by a different author. To me it had the feel of an unfinished draft rushed out to meet a publishing deadline, which, with further editing, could have become a much more coherent and polished novel. The bones of the story were there, but the flow and balance that made the first book such a triumph were largely missing. I found significant sections of the book (chapter upon chapter, particularly at the start) to be predominantly highly detailed explanation and scene setting, without getting any feeling that the story was progressing. The pace felt decidedly uneven and there were times when I was skim reading passages, simply because I wanted the narrative to move on a little.

To be fair, there is a story of sorts there and, if you do make it to the end, things improve and the various strands are largely tied up. Indeed, the writing in the last few chapters flowed much better and felt more in keeping with the standard set by the first book, but by then I didn’t care.

So it’s not absolutely awful. But I didn’t find it to be a particularly engaging story. I didn’t have empathy for any of the characters. I found the pacing to be inconsistent and at times the writing came across as quite clumsy. And I have read the book once and listened to the audio-book twice and if I am honest I still don’t fully understand the plot. So I have to report that, for me, it wasn’t great. And I so, so wanted it to be.

I’ll stick with the first book.

AG 09/12/2020

Featured in Pixel Addict magazine, issue 3.