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.