Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was an epic novel which I enjoyed a lot. There wasn’t a hint of a sequel but Ready Player Two arrived and was written like a Hollywood movie instead of a novel. Read our book review below!
Ready Player Two Summary
After inheriting Halliday’s wealth and now living in his mansion, Wade is living the life. Or he would have been if his friends weren’t always busy and his girlfriend broke up with him leaving alone and miserable three years ago. But Halliday was not done with Wade even if he had been dead for a while.
Wade finds out that Halliday created an operational OASIS Neural Interface headset or ONI for short that lets you experience real world sensations inside of OASIS (virtual reality). So, Wade releases it to the public because he can’t imagine anything going wrong.
For a couple of years, nothing does go wrong. But then, Halliday once again bites everyone from the grave. After a certain amount of people use ONI, a new quest appears. A riddle is told and nobody can solve it so nothing comes out of it. Until someone does solve it to cash in the bounty Wade has put on the first riddle.
That embarks the avatar of Halliday named Anorak who is a corrupt A.I. to hijack the quest. Anorak hacks the new ONI update and doesn’t let anyone log out of OASIS. If a user uses the ONI headset for more than 12 hours, then their brains will get fried. That leads to Anorak having over 500 million hostages. He orders Wade and his friends to finish the last 6 quests and give him the seven shards that are rewarded once completing a quest.
Wade and his friends have to somehow outsmart an A.I. of the creator of OASIS. They also have to solve the rest of the quests in under 12 hours or millions of people will die. But they cannot let Anorak have his way. That leads to an epic battle that will determine the fate of OASIS and everyone who is stuck in OASIS.
Commentary
Compared to Ready Player One, this novel was not that great. The concepts are not that original and the plot is pretty much the same. This time around, the villain is Halliday himself (or a corrupted A.I. version of him anyway). What a big twist.
The novel feels like it was written as a movie script and not really as a novel. Which is sad because you can explore your characters and the plot a lot more in a novel. I don’t even believe Ready Player One is supposed to have a novel but when the money comes in, you can’t be surprised.
It would be an insult to call this novel an actual novel. It feels more like a comic book or a short story then an actual novel. I say that not to be mean but to say that the novel aspect was not used properly. The characters are one-dimensional, the plot is very generic and a copy and paste to be honest. When the author himself points out that IN the novel itself, then there is no coming back from that.
I do not like all the pop culture references in the novel because it is overkill. That is not an exaggeration. Cline has about two or three per page. They serve no purpose besides useless internal dialogue or unnecessary narration.
And do not get me started on how unrealistic the novel is. Not the virtual reality part. But the part where the characters all seem to be walking encyclopedias. Each character seems to be a fanatic about whatever topic the quest is about. You know, they can just Google it and we won’t think any less of them. In fact, Wade does do that when The Lord of the Rings is brought up. He gets called out for it so that does prove you need to know everything by memory or your not a real fan.
Conclusion
The magic does not carry over to the second novel. The references and the fun virtual ideas are fun for a debut novel. But when you keep on using the same ideas and strategy, people will lose interest. There is no motive to read the second novel because the first novel already does everything well. If you are unsure about reading this novel, don’t. The second half of the novel is the only interesting part and even then, you can see the plot and twist coming a mile away.
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