By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 30, 2020
Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut novel, Ready Player One, posited a mid-21st-century world in which the main characters were obsessed with 1980s movies and video games. The story’s insistence that entertainment from the author’s adolescence would be prized by teenagers three generations later comprised a novel-length form of wish fulfillment.
Nevertheless, Ready Player One was a bestseller, and Cline optioned the book’s film rights the same day he signed a publishing deal. The resulting movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and co-written by Cline himself, was if anything a more streamlined and enjoyable piece of entertainment than the original text.
As was perhaps inevitable, last month Cline published a sequel under the title Ready Player Two. (Naturally, a film adaptation is in the works.) The new book recycles some important elements of the old one: Wade Watts and his pals again embark upon a quest to find a bunch of objects a programmer has hidden in the Oasis, the vast networked gaming domain that inhabitants of an overpopulated Earth use to relax in the year 2047 or thereabouts.
Read the rest of this entry »