Ready Player Two

After listening to the first few pages I wanted to stop. Wade was such a dork making such obviously stupid but significant choices. However, the tension soon subsided during the long introduction of the scene (including a recap of the significant facts from the first book). In the end, the book was filled with many twists and turns and ended up merging the game world with the real world in some pretty ingenious ways - like how the real world controlled avatars sitting in rigs that controlled real-world robots.
Additionally, the book had multiple surprises that changed the perspective and opened up new ideas about saving memories and capturing the concept that ultimately our being/soul is just physics so why not be able to capture it and reconstitute it in an online world.
My only criticism was that the speed with which Samantha (Art3mis) forgave wade without any reconciliation seemed a bit silly, but in the end, it wasn't that significant a piece of the puzzle that it can be overlooked.

Эрнест Клайн обладает всеми качествами, необходимыми современному писателю: он в совершенстве владеет всеми буквами английского алфавита (это A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, но у каждой из них есть и зловещий карлик-двойник, вместе они это a, b, c, d, e, f, h, g, i, y, j, k, n, o, p, q, r, l, s, t, u, v, w, m, x и z) и большинством арабских цифр — в книге наиболее часто встречаются 1, 9, 8, и моя любимая 0 — и может генерировать их в большом количестве, работая за обязательно включенным в сеть компьютером с помощью аутентичной для 1980-х годов клавиатуры Apple Magic Keyboard.

Книга Ready Player Two является продолжением книги Ready Player One (это умная отсылка к системам нумерации, в которых Two стоит следом за One и означает на единицу большее значение чем единица), и её действие разворачиваеся после завершения действия книги Ready Player One, а заканчивается даже после начала действия книги Ready Player Two.

Книга поднимает важнейшие вопросы: так ли необходим художественному произведению редактор (господи, да, да), почему у продолжения тайтла, не вылезавшего из чартов The New York Times Best Sellers, этого редактора нет (мы правда не понимаем), и когда это всё наконец закончится (только что).

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unjerk: невероятно неизобретательная, оскорбительно глупая, бесконечно самоповторяющаяся ЁБАНАЯ ЗАЛУПА ПОШЛА ТЫ НА ХУЙ БЛЯДЬ, я надеюсь тебя сотни лет спустя будут исследовать как самый исчерпывающий набор детских антипаттернов в писательском ремесле.

Finally finished this. Took much longer to read than it deserved, imo. I was tempted to give it an extra star at the end just because I liked the last couple of paragraphs, and the last third or so of the novel was (I thought) much less cringe-worthy than the first third.

It’s hard to write a spoiler feee critique of this, so I’m checking the spoiler box.

Here goes: SO MANY problems with the premise(-es) of this book! I’m not sure if it was my reading or what, but it felt like one science fiction trope after another was just piled on to the plot here. Ubiquitous VR was the premise of the first book, and this book starts there, but then says... but how about direct brain interfaces? And brain backups? And rogue AI? And interstellar travel just thrown in there for good measure? (But none of these ideas explored in any real depth, just some ridiculous ideas about how they might come about.) oh, and with the exception of interstellar travel, one man invented all these things! (Although he did it with the help of a lot of teams, none of whom knew what they were working on!)

So in the first book, the technology is pretty hand-wavy, and that’s totally fine, (not every sci-fi has to be about tech ideas, I’m fine with that), but central to the premise was that the “VR internet” is not decentralized, it’s controlled by one corporation and ultimately owned by one person who left his entire fortune to the winner of a posthumous Easter egg hunt. So far so good. We never see any employees who are involved in the administration of said internet OR the contest, but logic dictates they exist, and are somehow prohibited/ethically/morally bound not to interfere in the contest. I vaguely recall that maybe it’s implied that they couldn’t even if they wanted to, but again, hand-wavy tech.

Book two occurs after someone has won the contest and gained FULL CONTROL of said company. Then a mysterious new contest is revealed!! It’s another Easter egg hunt! Sloppy plot-copy-paste aside, my issue is that now the main character who, I remind you, has full control of the company and thus the entire internet, is taking part in the Easter egg hunt. He hasn’t said “I would never cheat by doing something as simple as calling up someone in IT and having them search for Easter eggs in the database” (or you know any one of a million other plausible ways to find the contest now that he OWNS THE COMPANY... instead, he puts a BILLION dollar bounty on someone else finding the clues and giving them to him. Which they do.

If you didn't like Ready Player One just don't even bother with this - that should go without saying. And Ready Player One wasn't a perfect book - it has rightly received some call-outs for not the best writing and a very male-teen-centric view of 80s gatekeeping. Still, I really enjoyed it and the 80s nostalgia (being a child of the 80s myself), so I was happy to grab this book when I saw it available on the local library app.

Sadly it doesn't live up to the first book. Yes, there's still a heavy dose of 80s nostalgia, but we did that already, and just piles more of it does not a good book make. Wade is no longer a scrappy underdog we can root for but is now an Elon-Musk-esque billionaire with EXTREMELY alarming views about data privacy and protection, or total lack thereof. A new quest appears in the OASIS and a new urgent reason to complete it, and most of the book is now the "High Five" gang reassembling to chase down the seven Shards of the Siren against a deadline. The challenges for each shard are more of the same we saw in book one, minutae of 80s trivia, but since we've seen it before, not as much fun. (Plus the section on Prince ... wow. Did we REALLY need 100 pages - three CHAPTERS - of detailed Prince questing obscurity? I for one certainly did not.)

Then the ending seemed very forced and unbelieveable. Don't want to include any spoilers but in brief, Anorak's behaviour didn't make a lot of sense, Wade's decisions are EXTREMELY problematic regarding privacy, data protection, and all sorts of related areas, and somehow magically everyone ends up forgiving their differences without apparently seeming to resolve anything or really grow as people. Hmmm.

I'm sure Wil Wheaton will make the audiobook fun to listen to, but sadly this didn't live up to the first one. It felt forced, a mix of fan service and self-justification, that never really dug into any of the actually potentially interesting issues that it could have touched on.

I usually don't write reviews, but I was prompted for my opinion about this book so why not make it public: Ready Player Two is almost as fun to read as the first one. Granted, the novelty factor of RP1 cannot be repeated, but Cline did a good job to give me back a similar feeling to the first book, something he didn't manage with Armada. The latter often felt too contrived and trying too much to appeal to readers of RP1.

I started RP2 with the expectation to get a light, fun read and that is exactly what I got, nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it's cheesy and yes, the story doesn't always make sense and the moral and philosophical undertones are questionable if you look at them too closely. But that's not why I've read this book. I wanted to have fun with a story containing a lot of obscure pop culture references, and I wasn't disappointed.