Ready Player Two is fan-fic of '80s and '90s culture along with fan-fic of Ready Player One. The navel gazing aspect of Ready Player Two's fan-fictioning of its own universe hurts the book immeasurably. A too-big chunk of the book is spent recounting the quickly fading glory of Ready Player One (and we can surmise, the quickly fading book sales and royalty checks now that the movie fanfare has quieted). I suppose if Player Three ever gets a turn at the controls, the narrative will be so bogged down by empty nostalgia that nothing new will happen at all.
Toward the end of RP2, RP1's archenemy, Nolan Sorrento appears and says just about the truest thing in the book. He says the world of the OASIS is pathetic with its endless nostalgia for a bygone time. The beauty is that Cline knows he's creating potboiler bull crap. Yet he persists. With millions on the line, wouldn't you? Of course you would. We all would! That's one of the major problems with late-stage capitalism, but that's for another discussion.
Sorrento's observation does a few things. First, it addresses a major weakness in the story. Where nostalgia in Ready Player One felt fun, the nostalgia in Ready Player Two feels copious, tedious, and, as Sorrento points out, pathetic. Is there a worse insult? Who knows, but certainly, the mounds of nostalgia in Ready Player Two feels as hollow as an empty DeLorean hull.
The emptiness and pathetic aspect is not merely because it is inauthentic to live vicariously through pop culture of a bygone era (though it surely is), but the story itself lacks the imagination of the first book and the prose is too basic to provide a needed lift. Where the first of these books, I guess we'll call them books, exhibited prose craft, RP2 operates by making endless pop culture references that take on the feeling of a geeky series of non sequiturs. It's almost as if Cline converted chunks of Wikipedia entries into dialogue, peppering trivial dates and specs with "cool, huh?" comments.
A chapter in homage to '80s writer-director John Hughes catches Ernie Cline at his most transparent, an accidentally and unlikely popular fan-fic writer in awe of a talent capable of creating his own stories. Wade visits Hughes in his home. Hughes is in his office, typing away at another of his famous screenplays. When Wade leaves the office, he looks back down the hall and hears Hughes clacking on the typewriter, providing the one moment of nostalgia and longing that transcends a lackluster book. We can all wish for a moment that we were getting one last Hughes narrative rather than another of what looks to be an endless stream of empty Ready Player installments.
Of the writing of these books, there will be no end. We will likely even see an adult line of the books before it's all over called "Ready, Player?"
The best part of Cline's sequel is the extension of the nostalgia theme to resurrecting OASIS users through their .ONI save files. The OASIS now has the power to scan the brains of its users, forever store the individual's consciousness, and reproduce them if desired (before we laud Cline for creativity, sci-fi writers have used this trope for decades--it goes back to Gibson's Neuromancer where a copy of Case remains in the Matrix by the end--I used the trope myself in 2018s Tower Defender). But, it's clever that in a book that won't let geekdom of the '80s and '90s die, loved ones and friends can similarly be frozen in time and enshrined online. Cline recognizes that people like a universe where we don't have to let pop culture go, so he ups the ante, providing a universe where no one has to let anything go, ever.
With RP2, Cline has created an echo chamber for nostalgia. We're no longer feeling nostalgia for the '80s, we're given a nostalgia for the nostalgia of the '80s in Ready Player One mixed in with Ernie Cline's own glorying in his ascent to the role of New York Time's Bestselling author. In the first third of the book, almost entirely told by summarizing and recounting, Wade mentions the DeLorean parked in his garage, but it's hard not to unsee the image of Ernie Cline leaned up against the side of his DeLorean. Is it strange or poetic that the guy owns a DeLorean when what brought him his fortune was writing nostalgically about the '80s?
Whether art is imitating reality or reality is imitating art, Ready Player Two's narrative is limited by its main influence, '80s video games, a genre dominated by the image and motion rather than meaning. Video games, especially the earliest ones, were typically low on affect. When games do gesture toward emotion and meaning, the gesture is often slight and the field of meaning dominated by the completely unambiguous opposition of good vs. evil. Ready Player Two carries the limiting of affect and limiting of meaning over, replicating a video game's lack of complexity with characters that are either one dimensional or don't recognize their complexity.
And Cline isn't concerned with teasing out what that complexity might entail. Consider the "hero," Wade, who uses his newfound powers in OASIS to spy on everyone until he loses his spy powers when the Robes of Anorak disappear from his item inventory. Wade never comes to terms with the wrongheadedness of his actions or the problem that he was the type of person that would do such a thing. He magically becomes good and the problem point of moral complexity disappears like a ring-of-power possessing hobbit overeager to get his hands on dragon plunder (sorry for the geeky non sequitur, but, you know, that's the idiom of Ready Player Two--there's no good reason for any of the references other than the fact that references caused a lot of people to read Ready Player One, including Steven Spielberg, who is likely going to give us a second one of these films, so get "ready").
Oh, and consider that while we go about our lives, our 9 to 5s followed by 7 to 12s, Ernie Cline is writing Ready Player Three in his DeLorean with a big smile on his face. And what is he writing? Probably something like this:
Yeah, well, I had studied my '80s history, so I knew that the DeLorean was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro and noted for its gull-wing doors and brushed stainless-steel outer body panels. Pretty, cool, huh? Yeah, I opened those gull-wing doors and thought, cool. I did consider how this sports car was also noted for a lack of power and performance incongruous with its looks and price.-End Transmission-