Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline

 

Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline is the sequel to Ready Player One.  This one is also read by my friend, Wil Wheaton.  Of course, if you run into Wil Wheaton, you might, uhm, need to remind him that I am his friend...

Started: 12/31/2020
Completed: 1/6/2021
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I did enjoy social commentary such as:  "I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the great filter that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct instead of nuclear weapons or climate change.  Maybe every time a species grew intelligent enough to develop a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.  Only time would tell."

This book is an odd successor.  Instead of the scrappy underdog kid, you have arguably the richest man in the world.  As a protagonist it is an entirely different story.  Instead of a quest to win a prize, this book becomes a huge hostage crisis.  The romantic subplot falls very flat with me as opinions seem to change in minutes from one pole to another.  The excitement and urgency of the first novel felt like a video game in book form with a lot of fun trivia.  This book did not carry that feeling forward at all.  The trivia (the minutiae of Tolkein's unpublished works and the Silmarillion were drudgery and I broadly like that stuff--while the broad swipes, such as the nature of each of the ages was omitted) was not fun--it sort of felt like a lecture.

The ending made some sense, but, like other details that could have been omitted without any loss and would have been so much better if they were accurate.  On a simplistic level the time it takes to travel to proxima centauri is not decades but much longer and the thought that solar panels could provide power in interstellar space is simply ridiculous.  It is also easy to see that if one has photographic memory for eternity, the need for storage space grows to infinity--this is a trivial and immediate observation.  Who knows, maybe this will be the basis for the next book, but I'm not sure I would read it.