My superpower is being the last person on the planet to get on board with something popular. I’d love to pretend that it’s due to some hipster attitude of only considering things cool if they’re obscure and overlooked by the masses, but the reality is that I’m usually so engrossed in my preferred content that I ignore what is trending outside of my channels. I didn’t, for example, discover Breaking Bad until the series had ended. When I did, I binge-watched all seasons over the course of a few weeks. I admit, I didn’t watch it when it launched because the premise of a chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin didn’t appeal to me. But, it was brilliant.
The “You got one thing wrong. This…is not crystal meth” scene showcases the same nerd-hero (or in this case anti-hero) themes that permeate Ready Player One
Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was a similar experience. Years after it had been released and trended through the markets, I stumbled upon it. I vaguely knew it was peppered with 80s and gamer references. I hadn’t read it because I was engrossed reading exploration science fiction, and gamer/80 sci-fi wasn’t on my radar. After reading the first few chapters on my Kindle, I had a twelve-hour round trip drive planned for work, and opted for the audiobook narrated by Wil Wheaton. It was the perfect length for the trip.
I’m the same age as Ernest Cline. For the first time in my life, I felt that someone had written a book specifically for me. There are plenty of movies, tv shows, and books that throw 80s nostalgia at you, but Cline’s version is a specific subset of the 80s that applied to me. His character played Zork on a Commodore 64, knew about the secret dot room in Atari’s Adventure, and had posters of the same bands as me. Ready Player One’s protagonist, Wade, was poor, living in the futuristic version of a trailer park, using video games as an escape and watching other users do things easily, like teleporting off-world, that would break the bank for him. You get the feeling that this was the author’s experience growing up. I think this was one of the reasons RPO resonated with me so much. Growing up, I played Dungeons & Dragons with my friends because I loved the imagination of it, but also because it cost nothing once you had a rulebook. Where other students showed up Mondays wearing North Face parkas littered with ski lift tickets, my weekend budget was limited to $5 for a roll of quarters at the local arcade and a few cans of soda drank on a Sunday afternoon with four friends and a Dungeon Master’s Guide. Ski lessons or tennis lessons or any lessons that weren’t offered for free through my public school were out-of-reach, so I related very much to Wade in the opening portion of Ready Player One. It’s also one of the reasons that RPO was such wish-fulfillment for so many people. The little guy with scarce resources goes up against the mega corporation and wins.
When I saw the announcement of the sequel, Ready Player Two, I wondered where Cline could possibly go with the story, in the same way I wondered where the Matrix’s sequel would go. At the end of the Matrix, Neo has godlike power to control the matrix. What could challenge him? In the same vein, at the end of RPO, Wade is the omnipotent owner of the OASIS. Sequels are tough. People want more of the same but also something new. Deviate too far in either direction and everyone’s unhappy.
Ready Player Two picks up exactly where RPO left off. Wade is indeed the OASIS owner, granted superuser powers by the Robes of Anorak he was awarded at the end of the last book. Soon he learns that Halliday has other surprises for him, including a never-released new technology that allows users to directly connect their brains, Matrix-style, with the OASIS. In addition to “as real as life” immersion, the tech allows users to record real-world experiences, save them, and share them with others. If that sounds familiar, it’s the plot of 1995’s excellent movie Strange Days, where people sell life clips on the black market as a type of addiction.
RPT very briefly explores the possibilities of living another person’s experiences, mostly as an exposition dump, but quickly moves on. Indeed, the decision to release the OASIS Neural Interface (ONI) tech is summarized in a few sentences by the main characters, with only Artemis objecting. Perhaps on a disappointing note, Artemis and Wade immediately break up at the beginning of RPT. It’s feels like a cheat, like after watching Daniel Laruso spend the entirety of the Karate Kid fighting black belts so that he could go on a date with Ally only to have the Karate Kid II open up with a throw-away line about how they broke up off-screen.
Well, that was short-lived
To be clear, Wade is a jerk in RPT and Artemis should break up with him, but usually when you start the protagonist out as a jerk it’s a setup for a redemption arc, not an inherent personality trait. And Wade is a jerk. His superuser powers go to his head and he uses them to smite vengeance upon anyone who disrespects him, violating friends’ and strangers’ privacy because he has the ability, and even spying on people through their own unit’s cameras in real life. He’s like a malevolent Alexa.
SPOILERS AHEAD
In every superhero story, there’s a chapter where the hero loses his powers. It’s humbling, and intended to humanize them.
If you don’t know what this scene is from, you’re probably not the target audience for RPO
When this happens to Wade, my writer’s brain clicked and went ah-ha! Now I understand the set up. Wade will learn the error of his ways and have a redemption arc. Where he embraced technology without much thought of consequences, he will emerge at the end relying on human connection and the real world, a juxtaposition to where he started. In fact, the first novel had this. Wade, Artemis, and Aech all have something about their appearance that they are masking in the OASIS, and when they get together in real-life those differences turn out to be something that connects them. Instead of social-media-photo-perfect versions of themselves, they are real people, connecting in real life. In Superman II, admittedly Superman doesn’t really learn anything from giving up his powers other than he’s been given the great responsibility of keeping humanity safe and can’t ever lay it down. After he regains his powers, he simply returns to the diner where the bully was and knocks him senseless. As much as the viewer enjoyed the retribution, Superman didn’t learn anything from it.
This is also the case with Wade in Ready Player Two. The way the ONI technology becomes a problem isn’t due to humanity misusing it, but more due to a evil third-party exploiting it. The stakes - half a billion lives - are incredibly high. At the story’s resolution, you’d expect Wade to take a step back and say, “Wow! That was intense. Maybe all this wasn’t such a great idea, right now.” Based on my lead-up, you can guess how he handles it.
BIGGER SPOILER AHEAD
The plot deals with AI, which does seem like an inevitable evolution of the Matrix-like world of RPO. The technology to create an AI relies on copying a living person via a brain scan. The resulting duplicate is a sentient version of its real-life counterpart, persisting even if the real-life person dies. The scan can be captured without consent or knowledge of the real-life person.
Ready Player Two’s approach to the hugely ethical issue of duplicating a person without his consent and creating a new life imprisoned in the OASIS can be summed up as “Cool. Let’s do it!” The concept itself usually appears as a horror theme in sci-fi. In Black Mirror’s USS Callister, a programmer creates a virtual Star Trek-ish universe and populates it with sentient copies of his co-workers. From the copies’ point of view, they are his co-workers who awoke on this spaceship, remembering everything about their lives. The programmer makes himself the all-powerful captain, and their jailer. The result is a mix of comedy, horror, and satire that is simply brilliant.
The 2010 Battlestar Galactica spinoff Caprica went fully dark with its take on this technology. After two men lose their daughters in a terrorist attack, one tries to recreate both as AIs in virtual reality. When he brings the other grieving father in to see his creation, the father is rightfully aghast. His dead daughter has been recreated in a virtual space where she appears terrified, not knowing where she is in this dark void, aware that she is not breathing and has no heartbeat. “It’s an abomination,” he says.
Ready Player Two’s characters handle this technology with all of the curiosity of a new iPhone app.
Hearing all of this, you’d think I didn’t like Ready Player Two. That’s not the case - I’d give it 3.5 stars. It’s as imbued with 80s settings and trivia as the first, but still manages to be very imaginative, and some of the quest scenes are worth a second read just because of how crazy and fun they are. There’s an entire world dedicated to Prince, complete with a Scott Pilgrim-like arena showdown at its end. There’s a world that is a mash-up of John Hughes movies, with a bit of wish fulfillment to change the ending of Pretty in Pink. The final battle of the book is satisfying in the same way that a hovering Superman asking Zod to step outside of the Daily Planet was in Superman II.
The Ready Player series are all about having fun. They’re escapism for forty-somethings who would love to play with their childhood toys again. In a way, they’re a bit like Superman stepping into his crystal chamber to put down the mantle of responsibility for a while. For me, and I am squarely in Cline’s target audience, they are a chance to slip away from adulthood for just a while and enjoy the comfort of my Empire Strikes Back bedsheets, imagining a world like my D&D character’s where the nerd is the hero. So, whenever you read a book, you have to ask, “Did the author accomplish what he set out to do with the story?” It helps to view RPT as a popcorn-fun indulgence, and ask if you had fun reading it. I did. My critical comments here are how I think it could have been better.
Ready Player One resonated much more with me than Ready Player Two, and the main reason is that Wade was the underdog fighting his way to top. In RPT, he’s already at the top, so the story is less compelling when you’re already given every advantage to succeed. The story touches on several technological advancements that come with moral issues, but it doesn’t engage those issues. Wade needs a character arc and instead is given a straight line. These are ways it could have been elevated from popcorn fun to a memorable story.
So, my verdict? I’m glad I read it and I had fun. I did listen to the Wil Wheaton audiobook version this time, as well. If you can do audiobooks, it’s the way to go. Wil Wheaton is the voice of Parzival. If you enjoyed RPO (the book, which was different than the movie), you will probably enjoy RPT, so give it a shot.
When I’m not flying the virtual skies, I’m the sci-fi author of the Hayden’s World series. If you love exploration and adventure, be sure to check it out.