Shifty Reads Ready Player Two, Part 2

Normally I'd put a hook quote here, but, as explained last time, I'm trying not to quote the book too much. I'm half tempted to quote from "Nerd Porn Auteur" instead, but I think that poem might be a genuine infohazard, so I shall refrain.

Last time on Shifty Reads Ready Player Two, we learned of the wonders of the ONI device and how Wade Watts and his friends made a billion squillion dollars and made the world a better place and everyone was happily eating huge meals and having SEX-nonbinary.oni anytime they wanted. But all is not well for our nostalgia-addled protagonist.

Before the first real chapter, we get a short excerpt from Anorak's Almanac, which is too brief for its own subheading, so I'll summarise thus: "Life is like a video game, man."

Onward to the story proper.

0001

Wade wakes up in his woodland mansion - Halliday's old mansion - overlooking Columbus, to that song from Back to the Future, playing on the radio from Back to the Future, at the same time that it played in Back to the Future. He's just like Marty McFly. The book even says he wakes up "like Marty McFly".

I really am trying to scale back the small-potatoes snark for these pieces, but the book is not making it easy for me.

Wade is depressed, and stares morosely at the skyline. We get some notes about how the whole world has been reshaped around the events of the previous book: the hotel where he stayed is a tourist attraction now, as is a VR recreation of the slums where he used to live. But Wade feels the world has changed him, and he's alone in the mansion, aside from his cook and security team.

We're introduced to Wade's virtual assistant, Max. Max is, of course, Max Headroom. He makes a Wayne's World reference for no reason, and then starts Wade's morning routine, playing some Talking Heads (I swear to God, Cline, you'd better not ruin Talking Heads for me) and giving him the headlines. Wade kills time by playing an Indiana Jones game for a while with some conventional VR glasses, then takes a jaunt out to his garage, which has replicas of the cars from Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and Buckaroo Banzai. This is unsurprising, as Wade's car in RP1, ECTO-88, was a mashup of these four vehicles.

ECTO-88 is also the name of the film series Wade is now directing, a crossover of those four movies featuring VR facsimiles of the original actors.

It's at this point that I have to step back and take a good, hard look at what I'm reading, because this honestly reads like deconstructive parody. We're not too far in yet, and I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this sequel is a takedown and reassessment of the original, with the benefit of nine years' hindsight and some self-reflection. I don't think it's very likely, but it's not impossible.

Wade does weight training and some research - now, just as he immersed himself in the 80s last time, he's researching the life and pop culture tastes of Kira Morrow, the wife of Halliday's business partner and the apparent subject of the riddle. She really liked Doctor Who, it seems.

But he's got a board meeting soon. And that means he's going to see Samantha. Flashback time.

Wade and Samantha met in real life for the first time at the very end of RP1, and we learn that, between that ending and the start of this book, they fell in love and had loads of sex and everything was great for a while. Apparently "Space Age Love Song" was their song as a couple, which is... actually a completely legitimate choice, that song fucking slaps. But, as Wade suspected, Samantha did not like the ONI. She didn't like the idea of having her brain controlled, and worried about the addiction problems that were already extant with OASIS as-was.

Wade claimed that her concerns came from her privileged upbringing, and then said some more stupid, insensitive things (which, admittedly, he acknowledges as such). Samantha responded in the only language Wade really speaks, pop culture references, saying the world would turn into Sword Art Online if the ONI was released, which does admittedly sound like a terrible fate. When the board voted to release the ONI anyway, with Samantha being the only vote against, she broke up with him, and decided to focus her efforts on solving world hunger.

Here, then, is the real source of Wade's malaise. It's not the realisation that his life is still empty. It's not that he's devoted his vast resources to mass-produced VR instead of, just to pick a completely random example, solving world hunger. It's because the cute gamer girl dumped him. Cline takes a half-hearted swing at self-awareness here: Wade talks about how he's convinced himself that Samantha had grown to dislike his personal flaws, like being socially awkward, needy, and emotionally immature. But the implication is clearly that this is a coping mechanism and it was actually because of his attitude to the ONI, so the whole thing just reads as a pity party.

We now get an exhaustive breakdown of all the charities our heroes have set up. Along with the Art3mis foundation for solving world hunger, Samantha has become a jet-setting philanthropist superstar. Shoto has set up an aid and counselling programme for hikikomori, because obviously the Japanese guy has to do something Japan-specific. Wade's charity gives to orphans and kids in poverty, including free ONI headsets, obviously.

And Aech. Hoo boy, Aech. So Aech was Wade's best friend at the beginning of RP1, and the twist was that she was a gay black woman who felt more comfortable in a white male persona online. I felt this plotline was kind of mishandled, but I'll give it credit as an interesting idea. She has two charities listed here: one called Helen's House, which is housing for homeless queer kids (fair enough), and another dedicated to helping out poor African nations, like her native Senegal, with better technology.

She has named this charity the Wakandan Outreach Initiative.

I'm not saying Ernest Cline's understanding of Africa comes entirely from pop culture. But I'm not not saying that.

Wade also casually notes that GSS has paid off the US national debt (around $27 trillion at time of writing, and doubtless much, much more post-energy crisis), and replaced the police with robots to, and here I'm dipping into my tight quote budget,

reestablish the rule of law in the rural areas where local infrastructure had collapsed along with the power grid.

We do get a throwaway line about how these robots are incapable of hurting anyone, as though Cline realised how bad an idea this whole paragraph was in 2020 but couldn't bring himself to take it out.

Oh yeah, and Wade, Shoto, and Aech have also been preparing a space mission to Proxima Centauri, called the Vonnegut Project, to escape Earth and start a new life among the stars, featuring its own onboard VR realm called ARC@DIA, and they have tried to keep this from the entire world and Samantha, who is understandably furious when she finds out. She'd rather save Earth, you see, but Wade's plan is "the only responsible thing to do", according to our narration.

Our heroes, ladies, gentlemen, and SEX-nonbinary.oni.

0002

Out of the flashback. Wade swims some laps, puts on the same clothes he wears every day, and then it's time for another exposition dump about the three tiers of AI, which I'll summarise thus: Tier 1 is weak, Tier 2 is a little better, and Tier 3 is fully autonomous and self-aware, and currently theoretical but probably close to reality.

Wade has breakfast and tries to kill some time before the meeting. We learn that Aech and Shoto are now ignoring his calls - our heroes have fallen out, it seems. He cyberstalks Samantha for a while on ONI-net, and justifies it by comparing it to a recording of a fifty-person orgy, which is definitely worse. Thank God, he's cut off by his therapy appointment. His therapist is a replica of Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting, who asks him how he's getting on with his social media addiction. Wade has quit social media because all the haters posting mean viral songs about him and calling him "Penisville" (I didn't make either of those up) made him so angry that he started abusing his super-user privileges to hunt down and kill their avatars. Some of these trolls, though, were also posting racist memes about Aech, so it's okay, see.

The backlash that forms against these virtual killing sprees is called "Parzivalgate".

What is Cline doing here? Is this meant to be a satire of Gamergate, but with Sarkeesian and Quinn swapped out for a near-omnipotent multibillionaire with anger issues? If so, are we supposed to sympathise with Wade as the target, even though in this case the backlash is founded on pretty reasonable grounds? Is this Cline swinging out at his own "haters" for being mean about RP1? Food for thought.

Anyway, Robin Williams has helped Wade get over his addiction and now he's off social media forever and has also decided that social media is melting our brains or something, with all the rhetorical subtlety of those "father I cannot click the book" boomer cartoons.

Oh yeah, Wade has access to the self-destruct button for the OASIS and is confident that society will collapse if he ever uses it. Nobody else knows this, apparently not even the rest of the board. Just so you know.

On to the board meeting. Wade's ONI rig is inside a heavily armed spider tank he can operate from within the OASIS, so that not even physical attacks on his person can stop him from gaming. More rambling about unprotected ONI users getting targeted by serial killers and organ harvesters... wait, go back a few lines. Okay, yeah, that's a thing, but don't worry, there's a new deluxe version of the headset that will at least log you out if you're about to get murdered. There are some fascinating worldbuilding choices being made here, though I would rank this below the birth playback tradition from last time.

Wade gets in the spider tank and descends into his secret underground bunker, which is like the Batcave. (Brief aside about how it's unrealistic that Bruce Wayne could have built the Batcave.) He logs into OASIS - this time his passphrase is a They Might Be Giants lyric - and finally, finally, we've reached the board meeting.

But that's where I'm calling it for now.

We are now about 15% of the way into Ready Player Two, and, look, I'm trying not to get too negative too early, but fuck me, this is a mess. I legitimately can't tell whether we're supposed to sympathise with our narrator or not, the RP1-rehash plot thread has become completely lost in the weeds of clandestine Malthusian space missions and elaborate trolling revenge fantasies, and the references, the heart and soul of the original, feel even worse here because they're so very token, as opposed to the integral role they had in the hunt for Halliday's treasure. I'm sticking to my theory that this is all a genius subversion of everything people critiqued the original for, and will reveal itself with a flourish towards the end, but at this point I barely know what to think.