Hate the Player?

"The sequel isn't as good as the original" may be an enduring cliche, but it's generally true. Then there are the sequels that fall so far short, they make you question your opinion of the original.

Few modern authors have had a debut as big as author Ernest Cline with Ready Player One. When your book enters the zeitgeist so hard that Steven Spielberg is directing the movie adaptation just a few years later? Yeah, your publisher is going to be asking for a sequel. My recollection is that Cline resisted for a time, saying in interviews that he'd only do a follow-up if the right idea came along.

It's not the idea of Ready Player Two that I question; it's the execution. Plot-wise, it's pretty much everything that a fan of book one would expect in a sequel. The characters all return for a new adventure, loaded with a new barge of 1980s references and new fanciful VR technology. In concept, it's all pretty good.

But to borrow the endlessly repeated exclamation from the book: "holy shit." Holy shit, is the exposition awkward and laborious. Ready Player Two has at least as much long-winded world building in it as it does narrative. (And it has more pop culture shout-outs than either.) It takes almost a quarter of the book before the background is finally all set up and the actual story begins to unfold.

Part of the problem is how much repetition there is. Rarely does a chapter go by without repeating information established in a previous chapter. At first, I thought it was unsubtle planting of details that would come around to be important at the conclusion of the story. (And sometimes, it is.) A lot of the time, it's also Cline preemptively trying to address criticisms about holes in his plotting -- pausing the entire narrative for paragraphs at a time to tell his readers, "see, I thought of that... but you're wrong because...."

In the end, it seems mostly like this pedantic world building is the material Cline is truly interested in: imagining what the world would be like if everyone had access to convincing virtual reality. (It seems his editor agreed, leaving a lot of bloat in the story that really ought not to be there.) Well, that, and showing off just how much he knows (or researched) about early Japanese video games, John Hughes movies, children's shows of decades past, and what-not. I suppose this kind of material was the major draw the first time around, but it feels like leftovers this time -- stale and reheated.

A plot does eventually manifest, and it's probably not spoiling much to say that it involves another "Easter Egg hunt" along the lines of the first book. It probably shouldn't be any other way for a sequel. And yet, the stakes of this new hunt are ratcheted sky high and put under a preposterous time pressure, to a degree that it makes any "fun" happening in the book feel implausible. With a deadline so short, with consequences so large, it can only make for one awkward situation after another. The book also wants to serve up all that 80s pop culture that made Ready Player One such a hit... and yet all the time swapping geeky references feels like wasting precious seconds in light of the circumstances.

Also, strangely, I get the sense from Ready Player Two that Ernest Cline must not have liked the film adaptation of Ready Player One very much. I say this because he clearly has made choice after choice with his sequel to render it as near to "unfilmable" as possible. There's tons of inner monologue, lots of beats in the story, and too many impossible-to-secure-the-rights and too-obscure-for-most-people references -- that are too tightly bound into the narrative to easily be changed. (Like the "Shining for Wargames" switch of the first movie and book.) Does Cline not want to see a movie of this book?

Amid all these elements I doubt in the writing, I can report at least one joy in the reading. That's the fact that I listened to the audiobook version this time, which was performed by Wil Wheaton. I missed his reading of the first book, and it seems like I may have missed quite a lot. Wheaton is rather different than many audiobook performers I've heard, at least in this case. He doesn't go as far in creating distinctive voices for the different characters here -- one gets an accent, and that's about it. But he more than makes up for it with a powerfully enthusiastic performance. This especially suits the first-person narrative here, and you very quickly buy into the wildest parts of the adventure because of the committed delivery.

But overall, I can only see Ready Player Two as a big disappointment. When I look back at how I graded Ready Player One, I was actually more muted than many, calling it a B+. In comparison to that, I think it quite generous to call Ready Player Two a C-. Unless you simply loved the original (more than me) and just gotta have more, I'd say it's best to skip it.