There's an official ROBLOX experience promoting Ready Player 2, the new sequel to the metaverse novel partly inspired by Second Life and became so influential, it was required reading for employees at Oculus. (Because why not make a dystopian novel about a future so horrible everyone wants to live in VR a company's frame of reference.)
But is the sequel any good, and worth a read over the holidays? A advance couple reviews below with mild spoilers, so caveat geeker:
The Wade of Ready Player One has a clear rags-to-riches story, as his obsession with a bygone decade literally pays off and transforms his life. Ready Player Two’s reverse narrative is not nearly as compelling, and falls into the trap of altering its characters’ circumstances without actually depicting character growth. Aech, Art3mis, and Shoto go through major life changes yet somehow get even less plot development than the first time around. That trans character gets shuffled off to a side quest that will no doubt become its own tie-in novella, when it would have been more affirming for her to be front-and-center—the new Parzival, eager to crack the puzzle. None of these characters are elevated from supporting cast to Wade’s crisis of conscience. Unlike the OASIS, the world of these books remains static and unchanging. -- From Den of Geek
Baby, it’s on pic.twitter.com/In8EhYgDAa
— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) November 24, 2020
After solving world hunger with digital cake, our hero decides to reboot the US police as a force of drones and tactical robots, because as ever the billionaire tech CEO motto is: “I just can’t foresee anything going wrong with this so why bother worrying about how it could?” I can’t tell what bothers me more: the way Aech, the queer Black lady, pops up on cue to agree with the hero’s shitty ideas and paper-thin understanding of the world, or how the ideas that Cline puts in her mouth are so unintentionally stupid it also feels like doing her dirty
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