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Ernest Cline’s 2011 bestseller Ready Player One introduced readers to the OASIS, a VR wonderland where players, through their avatars, could live, work, and play all day, every day. After James Halliday, the OASIS’ creator, passes away, he leaves behind one hell of a quest for the denizens of his virtual world: find his hidden Easter egg, win control of the OASIS itself and become a multi-billionaire in the process. Ready Player Two reuses the broad strokes of that plot to comment on artificial intelligence, how we interface with technology, and hero worship, but becomes so mired in these incomplete explorations that it loses sight of what made Ready Player One special in the first place.
Ready Player Two opens with a prologue that picks up right after protagonist Wade Watts/Parzival wins Halliday’s hunt, immediately sidestepping the happy ending when Wade discovers another secret Halliday left behind: the OASIS Neural Interface (ONI) headset. Where players are used to experiencing the OASIS through VR headsets and haptic peripherals, an ONI headset delivers the OASIS straight into the brain, opening the door to experiencing the virtual world in a whole new way. Just don’t use it for more than 12 hours or the thing’ll fry your brain and kill you! That definitely won’t be a problem later on! The decision to release the ONI to the public creates a rift between Wade and Samantha/Art3mis, making running Gregarious Simulation Systems together with their friends Aech and Shoto quite awkward over the next three years. On top of that, the ONI’s release has triggered a second hunt left behind by Halliday for an artifact called the Siren’s Soul, which Wade is meant to collect.
It doesn’t take long for OASIS users to become completely addicted to this new way of experiencing the digital world, Wade included. The ONI is capable of letting users record and vicariously experience other users’ lives, both in and out of the OASIS. Wade righteously opines that this new tech has opened the door to new levels of global empathy by letting users step into each others’ shoes, but the argument feels like it’s on shaky ground when the #1 ONI recording worldwide is a 50-person orgy and GSS has to employ a team just to monitor illegal, illicit ONI uploads. That potential problem of escalation is completely ignored as Wade hunts for the Siren’s Soul.
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It was a huge swing to center the plot around another Easter egg quest and ultimately, it’s a diminished return. The first had a clear prize that the entire world was fighting for, and in an impoverished future, control of the OASIS is quite the golden ticket. Not only that, but the hunt was rooted in Wade’s enthusiasm for Halliday and the affinity for pop culture they both shared. Wade’s search for the Siren’s Soul, on the other hand, suffers from the mystique that surrounds the Macguffin’s nature. We spend much of the novel not knowing what Wade’s fighting for, but we at least know why: the villain’s using that pesky 12-hour ONI usage limit as a ticking time bomb of a bargaining chip to get Wade to collect the artifact for them, an exchange with some seriously uncomfortable implications once you find out what the Siren’s Soul actually is.
While just as fantastical as ever, the OASIS proves to be a more exhausting setting this time around. The first novel featured a healthy back-and-forth between the real and virtual worlds, giving us a lot more perspective on how the events in the OASIS were affecting the outside world. Due to the nature of the villain’s plot, and the fact that Wade sadly remains the only POV character in the book, nearly all of the action is locked into the OASIS this time around. That feels like a missed opportunity on two fronts. Not only are the real-world stakes of Wade’s quest massive and worth checking in on with more depth and regularity than they are, Wade continues to be kind of a tough guy to root for and giving us a break from his perspective in favor of, say, Samantha’s may have been a nice change of pace. Too often, it feels like Wade hasn’t carried forward any of the lessons about humility and connection he learned in his first adventure. A lot of his faults were more forgivable last time because he was an outsider, a poor kid with a lot to learn about the world and other people. But after that kid’s had a chance to learn those lessons and become one of the wealthiest people on Earth, you’re less inclined to cut him some slack, especially given how often he demonstrates a complete lack of self-awareness.
As Wade himself serves as a constant reminder of, Ready Player Two has a rocky relationship with hero worship. James Halliday’s failings in life take more of the spotlight this time around, and the benefits of his works increasingly feel like they aren’t worth the trouble. The wonders the next-level applications his technology are opening the door to here seem to outweigh the responsibility Halliday has for the damage they could (and do) result in for Wade and his friends. This feels frustratingly shortsighted, considering the expanded consciousness that Halliday has pioneered in his virtual world hardly seems entirely ethical, or even safe. Wade has become a hero to many (but a villain to more) in his own right, and new ally Lohengrin’s fanboy obsession with him, kneeling and calling him “sir” and all, edges the book into self-parody at times, and Wade just going along with it makes it feel like unintentional self-parody.
If you loved Ready Player One for its myriad pop culture references, you’ll be happy to hear they recur here in the sequel, and this time around end up feeling less egregious. Because this second hunt is pretty much entirely for Wade, much of the elitism that came with competing Gunters sparring with each other over minutiae and judging those they believed to be poseurs is gone. There are plenty of new worlds centered on fan-favorite movies, music, and literature for Wade and his friends to traverse, and the inside jokes and clear reverence toward the material keep Ready Player Two from feeling like a total misfire.
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