Ready Player Two tries but fails to make up for the problems of the original
Aux Features Book Review
“Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past generation’s nostalgia?” Ready Player One’s primary villain, Nolan Sorrento, asks this of the protagonists of Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline’s sequel to his 2011 debut novel. “The entire OASIS is like one giant graveyard, haunted by the undead pop-culture icons of a bygone era. A crazy old man’s shrine to a bunch of pointless crap.”
The squad of ’80s-obsessed young adults in Cline’s vision of 2048 doesn’t really have a good answer to this critique, which could just as easily be leveled at Cline and his readers. Ready Player Two reads like a fusion between a Wikipedia page and a video game walk-through: It makes copious references but absolutely ensures readers get the joke by having characters share the source of a quote while also making it clear that it’s shameful to not already know this.
The tension between self-awareness and self-indulgence runs throughout the sequel, as Cline makes it clear he’s read plenty of the criticism leveled at his first novel and clumsily tries to address it. Some holes are easier to fix than others, like complaints that narrator Wade Watts, a.k.a. Parzival, resurrected his best friends after they were killed in the epic battle of good geeks versus evil corporate drones at the end of Ready Player One. The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men—is more difficult to address.
Ready Player Two suffers from the same problems as the latter Harry Potter books in that it only follows the perspective of “the chosen one,” while potentially more compelling characters and plots function in the background. The book’s first 100 pages show Wade embodying the worst aspects of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as he releases a new technology dubbed the OASIS Neural Interface, which allows users to fully embody their digital avatars and even share memories, which Cline acknowledges in the text is a fusion of the plots of The Matrix and Strange Days.
Wade becomes an ONI addict, spending as much time as his body will allow in the virtual worlds of the OASIS, often killing the avatars of people who said mean things about him or stalking Samantha Evelyn Cook, a.k.a. Art3mis, who dumps him after just 10 days because she believes the ONI technology is bad for humanity. She spends her time traveling around the globe and trying to spend her newfound fortune to make the world a better place. This doesn’t really work, but Cline never gives any satisfying reason why. The important thing is that the world is still a miserable place where escapism is all-important.
After all the brooding and exposition dumps, it’s time for Wade to redeem himself as the heir of OASIS creator James Halliday by completing yet another geeky Easter egg hunt. While there are a few acknowledgments that nerd culture didn’t stop in the ’90s, like a mention of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor of Doctor Who, the reference-happy characters never pause to acknowledge that the plot of Ready Player Two is just a mashup of the Black Mirror episodes “San Junipero” and “USS Callister.” Maybe that’s because it takes the characters an infuriatingly long time to figure out what’s going on.
Rather than being devoted to the passions of Halliday, this hunt is focused on his unrequited love, Kira Morrow, who was instrumental in creating the OASIS but gets left off the credits because of sexism. As a result, the quests are more focused on the culture that would be relevant to an ’80s girl, like John Hughes movies and Rieko Kodama’s video games.
Yet, the narrative remains fixed on Wade, who is the only one able to complete these quests, with his more diverse supporting cast feeding him lines and trivia. Given that every time Wade uses the ONI to step into a woman’s body, he feels the need to comment on his boobs, it’s probably a good thing that Cline didn’t try to switch perspectives to a female character. But the tinge of embarrassment Wade feels with every bit of new culture he tries to enjoy stains the book’s attempts to elevate them. When Wade immerses himself in a world dedicated to Sailor Moon, which Kira loved, he decides he wants to cosplay as her love interest, Tuxedo Mask, but will only do it in the privacy of his own home.
The same issue is present in Cline’s efforts to acknowledge the effects that the OASIS technology would have on gender, race, and sexuality, which he hinted at in Ready Player One through Aech, a Black lesbian who portrays herself as a straight white man in the virtual space to enjoy the privilege that comes with it. When Wade discovers that a woman he has a crush on is trans, he says it might have once made him question his sexuality, but that reliving the memories of having sex in other people’s bodies or enjoying it risk-free in the OASIS has made him a lot more open-minded. That’s nice for him, but the idea that it would take a person 28 years and immersive VR technology to make them see trans women as women is disappointing.
There’s certainly some fun to be had in the romps through Middle Earth and an entire planet dedicated to Prince’s life and music, but segments of the book are needlessly repetitive or dry, as Cline seems more concerned with explaining how everything works and sharing trivia than telling a good story. Other portions of the book seem to be written with an eye toward a sequel of the 2018 Steven Spielberg adaptation, with Cline delivering armies of identically dressed baddies and showy boss fights.
Ready Player Two is filled with ridiculous fantasies, like Wade owning the rights to Back To The Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai and using them to create cross-over films as a passion project. But the most outlandish might be how quickly all of Wade’s bad behavior is forgiven when he gets to relive his past Easter egg-hunting glory. Ready Player One hasn’t aged well and Cline’s star was tarnished even further by his abysmal second novel, Armada. It’s easy to imagine that Cline hopes that he, too, can be redeemed if he apologizes just a bit but mostly does the same things that so many people loved almost a decade ago. He’s still living in the past, and unlike Wade, he can’t save the world through the power of nostalgia.
Author photo: Dan Winters
393 Comments
Ready Player Two reads like a fusion between a Wikipedia page and a video game walk-through: It makes copious references but absolutely ensures readers get the joke by having characters share the source of a quote while also making it clear that it’s shameful to not already know this.
Thanks, I hate it.
I know virtually nothing about this entire genre – so, are there good novels based on role-playing games (real or fictitious) that don’t require a lot of previous knowledge? Maybe in YA?
John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van, kinda sorta maybe. It’s definitely good, and infinitely better than anything Cline has ever foisted on the public.
I second Wolf in White Van. It’s a very good, quite nearly great, novel.If you’re willing to read comics books, Die by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans is an ongoing series with a very clever, thoughtful, tragedy-tinged take on the ethos and motivations of RPG construction.
Thank you both for Wolf in White Van. I’m going to check it out, as in, it’s already in my hot little hand. I read the first 3 pages and am hooked.
His other book Universal Harvester is really good and has an unsettling vibe.
Going to second the recommendation of Die. It’s great, and in the individual issues, Gillen clarifies some of the things for non-RPGers in the backmatter.
Thirding *Die*. Everything I know about D&D I only learned from Order of the Stick, but honestly for me it’s about the sheer fuckery of the human interactions (which he also did an awesome job in WicDiv on), and I do get the Tolkien/Bronte references mostly.
An essential read for this vein of “virtual reality MMORPG” is Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash- definitely not YA, but a fantastic read. As for YA, I don’t know if it’s tangential enough to fit what you’re looking for, but Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind is a great read.
RP1 really is just Snow Crash but Stupid and Badly Written.
Hahaha that is too fair to Cline- RP1 essentially is the lovechild of an easter egg hunt, teenage angst, and a Buzzfeed listicle of era-specific pop culture references.
There’s a certain symmetry to it, though. RP1 is bad Snow Crash, Armada is (very) bad Ender’s Game, and RP2 is braindead Neuromancer. He’s playing all the hits!
I actually bought Armada for the stupidest reason (I liked the cover :|) and it’s the base of my to-read books nowadays. I keep hearing it called a derivative of The Last Starfighter, which I haven’t seen, and I’d much rather watch the film.I don’t think I’ll buy many more Cline books, if I want pop-sci-fi I enjoy John Scalzi & Cory Doctorow much more.
Yeah, Scalzi does some similar things with pop culture nostalgia, but *well* and with self-reflection (Redshirts is the kind of novel Ernest Cline wishes he could write).
Weirdly, I would almost recommend Armada. Don’t get me wrong: It’s dog shit. But, like, it’s the work of a madman. It’s a book where the ostensive hero doesn’t make any meaningful choices until the last 10 pages of the book, and it has one of the most baffling epilogues in literary history (it defies explanation). The main character has the hots for his mother, and it’s not subtext! A quintuple holocaust happens and nobody is all that bothered! Military juntas spy on people just to find out their favorite snack food!You really start to question if it’s a real novel that actually got published.
I hated Redshirts. Any self-reflection it featured was skewed and cynical, as I recall, but I have no intention of ever re-reading it. Cline’s work is awkward but earnest.
I didn’t hate Redshirts, but the fact that it won a Hugo really devalued the award in my eyes.
Looking at the other nominations (Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Throne of the Crescent Moon, Blackout, and 2312), I’m not convinced it was a particularly strong year for best novel candidates. Although 2312 sounds interesting, I haven’t heard it referenced much since that Hugo slate.
I’ve not read any of those, though I’ve read other books by Kim Stanley Robinson (he’s pretty dry, for my taste) and Lois McMaster Bujold (all of which were very entertaining). I have to imagine that in all of 2012 there were SF/F books that were better than Redshirts. But I suspect that it won more because the people who nominate and vote like John Scalzi the dude, than they thought Redshirts was the best eligible novel to be published that year. And part of the reason is because I look at the nominations that his books have received….and I’m just underwhelmed. They aren’t bad books, IMO, I usually like them but I’ve never thought “Wow!” in response to something he’s written. (One thing I will one hundred percent give him credit for is making his books fun to read. I may not have loved Redshirts, but like his other books that I’ve read there wasn’t any part when I thought “this is really dragging”.) Meanwhile, someone like Alastair Reynolds, a compelling writer who fills his work with mind-bending ideas, has zero Hugo noms.
But, that’s just me going by my own personal tastes, obviously fiction is subjective enough that there’s no real right answer.
Damn… I could hate read the shit out of that.
With slightly less underage sex
Ah, but there’s plenty of it in Armada.
And let’s not forget that Snowcrash wasn’t exactly a paragon of literary genius. While it’s certainly one of Stephenson’s more compelling and accessible books, his insatiable need to stop the story for pages and pages at a time while he holds forth on whatever topic he’s heavily researched is pretty maddening and just wrecks the flow of the story. And Snowcrash just sorta… ends. Like an editor said “Goddamnit, you don’t have enough clout for a 700 page doorstop. You don’t make Stephen King numbers.”Then Snowcrash and Diamond Age did well and suddenly you’ve the Baroque cycle and whatever the fuck Anathem was…I maintain his best book, and the only one that holds together as both fun story AND info-dump, is Cryptonomicon, and that’s mostly because the infodumps came largely from Bruce Schneier, one of the pre-eminent digital cryptography experts on the planet. There’s even a way to code messages securely within a pack of playing cards that features in the novel, and there’s a whole appendix devoted to it showing exactly how it actually works. It was Schneier’s invention.
Oh, definitely. Snow Crash is mostly worth reading just for the intro sequence with the pizza delivery. After that it’s mixed , though I have to admit I have more patience than most people for naval gazing about Sumerian mythology and meta-languages. Maybe that’s what I was missing from RP1…
My friend’s review at the time was “it’s the first two thirds of the best book you’ve ever read”.
I’ll admit Anathem felt like a slog at first with having to flip back to the glossary every other paragraph, but I am so glad I stuck with it. Honestly it might be my favorite novel, and it just gets better every time I read it.But on the other hand, I’ve given up on multiple other Stephenson books, including Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, and Reamde, so maybe I’m the one who’s wrong.
Anathem is my favorite of his by leaps and bounds, but it does take a couple of chapters to click in.
It’s one of my favorites, and Stephenson’s a good enough wordsmith that I’ll keep reading through his multi-page treatises that are only tangentially related to the plot.
The problem.with the Baroque Cycle is that in order of interest the storylines rank Shaftoes and Pirates> Waterhouse and Newton> Eliza and the boring Court intrigue/Financial stuff. But the order of IMPORTANT PLOT THINGS HAPPENING is the opposite to that…which means having to go back and slog through the Amsterdam bits.
I gotta say that Anathem was one of the only Stephenson books that I’ve ever found just ridiculously bad, and even borderline offensive. I’m surprised that today’s “woke” culture (particularly based on some of the comments on this page) didn’t find that novel as subtly racist as I did. I guess the sideways, analogous nature of the racism didn’t strike people back then. I wonder if it would’ve looked so subtle if it was published again today.
loved Snow Crash…
Such a great book, and IMHO a great intro to contemporary cyberpunk, and Neal Stephenson.
Diamond Age too, then I got into his epics (Cryptonimcon and others), where I felt I was just too dimwitted to follow along.
I like a dense sci-fi novel, but I need to be in the right mind for it. I’ve eyed Cryptonomicon for ages, but I’ve got a few more books to get through before I’m ready for it!
And, in addition to Snow Crash is Stephenson’s later Reamde, about the development of a MMORPG and the real-life hijinks that ensue. IIRC there are Russian mobsters, right-wing terrorists, and Chinese security forces to deal with. I didn’t enjoy the sequel as much though.
Reamde is my current read, and it’s really great! I love Stephenson’s knack for complicated arrays of characters, and giving as much structure to the antagonists as the protagonists; I’m loving how the Russian mobsters feels less like something from a film and more like a real organisation.
The sequel ( Fall ) started off interesting and then turned into a fantasy/Bible retelling in VR that was almost totally unlike Reamde or the first part of the book.
The first part being only about 1/6 or so of the book. I really liked that first part a ton. Then it turned into the fantasy/Bible slog…
It did provide a punchline for a character who’s been knocking about in Stephenson’s books for years though.
Yeah that sequel was rough going, wasn’t it? It did convey a sort of uneasy mood well enough and I liked that parts that were playing on bible tropes but once it got into the LOTR riffing it got super dull.
But Snow Crash was written back before Stephenson got rich and famous enough that he no longer had to listen to editors telling him “You might want to trim all this stuff that has nothing to do with the rest of the novel down a bit…”
Reamde, leads on to Fall, or Dodge in Hell, which is really long but good .
This is on the Y end of YA, but Homerooms and Hall Passes by Tom O’Donnell (DISCLOSURE who I’m friends with). Young teen characters in a D&D-like fantasy world (rogue, mage, warrior, etc) like to unwind after adventures by playing a roleplaying game where they pretend to be middle school students, magic happens and they get sucked into the game and have to learn how to play their characters for real. Light but fun and well-thought-out with a lot of roleplaying humor.
Ha, that’s a wonderfully clever premise. I generally dislike the “people from the real world get transported into game/fantasy/whatever world” trope, but this is surprisingly the first time I have ever heard of someone flipping it like that.
Yeah, it’s really well done (some amusing stuff happens to the players who blew off developing certain aspects of their character histories), with a very YA-friendly metaphor of being uncertain how to act/exist in middle school, even if you are not a magical being.
It’s been a few years but I enjoyed You by Austin Grossman. It’s a lot about the development of a computer RPG in the 80s(?) but I seem to recall the narrative moves between the development team and their in-game characters pretty fluidly.
I’d like to second You. Ernest Cline has never had the ambition to write anything other than consumable content for his own demographic, but You is actual literature.
Perhaps Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame series (college kids start roleplaying, and suddenly find themselves in another world, inhabiting their characters’ bodies).
I read those books back when I was younger and loved them so much. Every now and then I think I should go back to them.
RPO doesn’t belong in a genre. Just like my weekly grocery list.
The X of Swords 22 issue event in X-Men has been a fantastic RPG brought to life.I takes place in Otherworld, a crossroads of dimensions and is not at all what you expect from start to finish.
The problem with answering that is, I think, trying to figure out what your definition of “good” is. For some “good” might mean a faithful exploration of the experiences and memories they have from a shared pastime. For others “good” might mean character diversity, inclusivity and a non cishet white male viewpoint. Without clarification it’s hard to formulate a suitable recommendation.There is an entire subgenre called Litrpg opening up of fantasy literature based on roleplaying games. You can search for stuff in that general genre and see what piques your fancy.
It’s post-cyberpunk, though I’d suggest diving into William Gibson’s Burning Chrome short story collection for a terrific collection of classic cyberpunk.
Tad Williams Otherland series definitely.
The same issue is present in Cline’s efforts to acknowledge the effects
that the OASIS technology would have on gender, race, and sexuality,
which he hinted at in Ready Player One through Aech, a Black
lesbian who portrays herself as a straight white man in the virtual
space to enjoy the privilege that comes with it. When Wade discovers
that a woman he has a crush on is trans, he says it might have once made
him question his sexuality, but that reliving the memories of having
sex in other people’s bodies or enjoying it risk-free in the OASIS has
made him a lot more open-minded. That’s nice for him, but the idea that
it would take a person 28 years and immersive VR technology to make them see trans women as women is disappointing.Frustrating to hear that this continues Ready Player One’s bizarre insistence on almost using its premise to honestly grapple with the implications of immersive VR technology, only to abandon it in favor of cheap, nostalgia trip thrills. I had this conversation with a friend a few months ago after seeing the movie on a lark, but it’s very clear that Cline knows that there are actually interesting ideas in his world and is either incapable or unwilling to address them; his continued inability to do anything interesting with Art3mis, combined with that cringe-inducing use of a trans character, really confirms that nothing’s really changed there.
Yes, there were some parts in the book that I thought we might be going somewhere good, only for them to be completely forgotten so very obvious plot points could be explained word for word ahead of time.
The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men—is more difficult to address.
I agree with you that this book sounds objectively terrible. But outside of proposing that straight, white men not be allowed to have books published anymore I’m not really sure what you want the poor guy to do. Either he tries to write what he knows and about his own interests, which was the complaint about the first book, or he makes an attempt to acknowledge a pop culture world outside of his own, which judging by this sentence is actually what he does in the second book:
As a result, the quests are more focused on the culture that would be
relevant to an ’80s girl, like John Hughes movies and Rieko Kodama’s
video games.
Cline is most definitely a bad and very self-indulgent writer. But I definitely don’t think it’s fair to go after him from the identity politics angle given that he clearly is making an effort here.
I don’t think the complaint of the first book was that it was about Cline’s interests, but that he didn’t synthesize something new out of those interests and fell back on pure reference of them. It was like reading “Family Guy: The Novel”
Or, to put it better:
That’s the usual complaint, yes. This article, as quoted by the OP is that “the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men”. And like the OP, I think that’s a bullshit complaint, because A) both the author and the character are in fact cishet white men, and B) the implication is that only cishet white men can be interested in these things, which is ironically the kind of thing gamergate trolls would say.
Don’t you know every white man’s dream is to create a digital world dedicated to Sailor Moon and the lady who did the art for the Phantasy Star games?
I don’t think the complaint of the first book was that it was about Cline’s interests, but that he didn’t synthesize something new out of those interests and fell back on pure reference of them.No, I think that’s a different complaint from the complaint in this review:
The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men—is more difficult to address.
The A.V. Club’s complaint seemingly has no problem with a juvenile paean to geek pop culture nostalgia. It only asks for a wider range of geek pop culture to be mindlessly nostalgic about.
EXACTLY. You could replace all the Monty Python, Back to the Future, Knight Rider, and Ghostbuster references with references to more LGBTQ-related media from the 80s, like Polyester, Desert Hearts, Love Sidney, or An Early Frost, but that wouldn’t fix the problem that Cline does nothing interesting with his self-congratulatory references. A wankfest is a wankfest, whether it’s a cishet white man’s wankfest or not.
Neckbeards can’t generate their own cultural capital, so they’re forced to appropriate others’ and then trade it second hand. Hence why pretty much all nerd “culture” is derivative. Cline is just the natural end result of that. “I can’t create a character or scenario that would raise the emotions and thoughts in my readers that I’d like, but by golly Lawrence Kasdan did once!”
He had it down until he said “Mrs. Pac-Man.”
Yep. Incredibly apt. The best thing I can say about RP1 is that I cannot remember much about it, and thus can’t shit talk it all that much.
holy shit that dudes song is amazing.
It’s possible to make an effort and still fail. And it’s incumbent on the critic to acknowledge when that’s happened.
When you get right down to it, Cline’s writing hasn’t really changed all that much from back when he was writing creepy poetry about wanting more nerdy pornstars.
The most insidious misogyny is always the one which couches it’s hatred for women in terms of exalting the “right type” of woman; whether it be eighteenth century “republican motherhood,” the nineteenth century Victorian “cult of domesticity,” or the twentieth century suburban housewife, misogyny is always an ongoing and ever evolving process of negotiating the line between being the “right type” of woman and the “wrong type” of woman. Just reading this complete drivel one gets a clear idea of Cline’s utter contempt and almost violent rage for the “wrong type” of woman.
Yes, yes, a short poem expressing distaste for a particular style of objectification is the perfect grounds to accuse someone of violent rage.
[redacted](Never mind, I thought you were talking about the novel, and didn’t understand it was about the comment quotation above. I get it now.)
I came just to read this tripe again. Hoo boy is it bad.Actually, I take that back. Tripe, when prepared correctly, can be delicious. This is indistinguishable from an incel forum post.
Ugh, what a tool.
Jesus christ the dude’s a loser.
“The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses
entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men—is more difficult to
address.”He’s just virtue signaling like a snowflake.
There’s “write what you know” and there’s “write an entire fantasy world devoted exclusively to your personal tastes and interests and pretend that it represents the entirety of ‘geek culture.’”
Is that what he did? I admit I only saw the movie, but in the movie it seemed like the geek culture was simply the obsession of one super rich dude. So basically he made himself a super rich tech dude who was obsessive about parts of geek culture. I do not believe the story ever claimed that was anything more than one man’s obsession.
Except it does, because the rich dude also invented the entire virtual world they inhabit, and meticulously researching and assimilating the rich dude’s (Cline’s) interests is key to success in the big motivating quest of the novel. For the protagonist and most of the characters in the book, who all live in the near future, memorizing the plot to War Games and Zork tutorials and whatever the fuck is the entirety of “geek culture.”
Not really.It’s just the entirety of the culture of Wade and his friends. The book never posits that the “gunters” are the only geeks in the entire world.It does function as a thinly veiled plot device for the author to make 80s nostalgia seem cooler than it is. But its escapist fiction and that’s the fantasy.
It’s fiction. Cline could just as easily have made his rich dude secretly love the Strawberry Shortcake cartoons, or anything outside of Cline’s own personal interests.There’s also the problem of an author deliberately writing a man-child with arrested emotional development and not noticing that having that character obsessed with everything he’s obsessed with paints him as another arrested development case.
People will always equate a major character to the author.
I’m not sure I understand the distinction. Isn’t everything that comes out in TV, print, or movies already pretending to represent geek culture or any kind of culture, based on the knowledge and interpretation of the writer(s)? The expectation that any writer is supposed to represent any culture accurately is the fantasy.
But outside of proposing that straight, white men not be allowed to have books published anymore I’m not really sure what you want the poor guy to do. Either he tries to write what he knows and about his own interests, which was the complaint about the first book, or he makes an attempt to acknowledge a pop culture world outside of his own, which judging by this sentence is actually what he does in the second book:Why should this factor into how the actual art is judged? No one is trying to “cancel” him or whatever. This isn’t “going after” him, it’s reviewing the book her wrote.
I’m not accusing anybody of trying to “cancel” him. I’m saying it’s a bit ridiculous to criticize him for being too far up his own ass of straight white guy nostalgia while at the same time criticizing him when he clearly attempts to move beyond straight white guy nostalgia.Basically I’m asking what they actually want the guy specifically to do differently and give specifics beyond “stop being problematic.”
Basically I’m asking what they actually want the guy specifically to do differently and give specifics beyond “stop being problematic.”
This is a book review, not an editors note.
Plenty of literary criticism includes suggestions of what the reviewer would have liked to have seen done differently.
He needs to give up his intellectual property rights to someone who isn’t a cishet white man, then they can write the book.
The review also points to specific parts of the book – like the protagonist’s fixation on boobs – that represent concrete opportunities to change. But yes, the idea that a reviewer should consider the possible work that might have been and not the work that actually exists is absurd.
As juvenile as that sounds, it’s totally believable that a 20-something nerd would be fixated on suddenly having boobs. Doesn’t mean it’s good writing, then again it’s not like the story is aimed at mature adults. It’s a nostalgia trip to the time when we were all asshole kids.
To be fair, there is no “fixation on boobs” in the novel. He mentions them once.
This review exaggerated that, and then you took the reviewer’s comment and ran with it even further, turning it into “a fixation”. Like a game of “telephone”. See how that works?
Sorry, extrapolating criticism to “outside of proposing that straight, white men not be allowed to have books published anymore I’m not really sure what you want the poor guy to do” is maybe not accusing the critic of canceling, but only by the slimmest margin. It’s saying, “if the critic thought through what they are arguing, the would realized, like I have, that canceling these authors is the only solution.”
Anyway, I think the problem has been pointed out that it’s fine and good to “attempt to move beyond” being up his own ass, but if after that attempt, he’s still up his own ass, well he needs to try harder.
cool beans he tried…
Now maybe he should actually get better at writing.
Again, I didn’t accuse anyone of “cancelling”. I’m not making some stealth pseudo-argument about “cancelling.” I used the intentionally ludicrous example of white guys never getting a book deal again to highlight what I see is a flaw of viewing everything through the lens of identify politics.
It seems to me that this is push for us to require our art (and I really struggle to consider this book “art”, but you get my point) to tackle issues relating to diversity and representation, but there’s this other push to attack people for “cultural appropriation” or “not understanding the [group] experience” when somebody does attempt to do that. This is the same, equally dumb situation that went down with American Dirt: a writer attempted to explore and humanize Mexican immigrants and she got criticized for both stealing their story and not being qualified to tell it because of her own ethnic background.And to bring this back to my intentionally silly example: unless we only allow books to be published from writers that only stick to characters of the same sex/gender/orientation, this tension is still going to exist.
You’re expecting consistency? Outrage is the goal, not a “better Ernest Cline novel” or whatever the fuck.
The problem with American Dirt is that it was not so well-written (though better than this, I dare guess). Critics said it was full of clichés and clumsy writing,and particularly that the protagonist—a character who spent their whole life in Mexico, was married to a investigatory journalist—is herself clueless about MexicoFrom the NYT review:
“American Dirt,” a new novel by Jeanine Cummins, has been positioned as a breakout hit of the year. The story of a mother and son’s desperate attempt to flee Mexico for America, it arrives on a gust of rapturous and demented praise — anointed “The Grapes of Wrath” for our time, “required reading for all Americans.”Allow me to take this one for the team. The motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. This peculiar book flounders and fails……The real failures of the book, however, have little to do
with the writer’s identity and everything to do with her abilities as a
novelist.
What thin creations these characters are — and
how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations…
…But
does the book’s shallowness paradoxically explain the excitement surrounding
it? The tortured sentences aside, “American Dirt” is enviably easy to read. It
is determinedly apolitical. The deep roots of these forced migrations are never
interrogated; the American reader can read without fear of uncomfortable
self-reproachTo be fair another problem with American Dirt is that it was hyped as ‘The Grapes of Wrath for our time’ and was given a 7-figure advance and tapped for Oprah’s book club and a movie treatment. Anything that gets to that level of success is gonna have people look more closely at it and say, “well, it’s no masterpiece.”
For what it’s worth, I completely agree with the NYT’s sentiment there, which is that good intentions can’t make up for bad writing. And I also agree that the challenge for Ernest Cline is to improve as a writer by attempting to more deeply understand the thoughts, feelings, motivations of characters with different backgrounds from his own instead of grounding everything in his own experience.
I think what bothers me about the criticism of the AV Club writer (and the other people tearing the book apart on Twitter) is this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” sensibility. I’m somebody who places a lot of emphasis on intention, the idea that you deserve to be treated as a good faith factor if you can demonstrate that your heart at least is in the right place. Cline made an effort to respond to the critics of his previous book and add more diversity, and admittedly that effort was not a success. But at the very least the guy deserves some level-headed feedback about how to improve instead of being buried under an avalanche of hot takes because he had the gall to write a book that millions of people (inexplicably, in my opinion) enjoyed.
On a side note, I really appreciate this discussion. It’s rare that the AVC does book reviews and I always enjoy having a spirited debate on them.
I think you can legitimately question the process which allowed some of the bits in this book to get all the way to publication – Laura Hudson’s Twitter thread, complete with both excerpts *and* DMCA’d missing excerpts – lays out some paragraphs that I really can’t see any minority being like “yeah that’s a great way to address your problems with representation”
criticizing him when he clearly attempts to move beyond straight white guy nostalgia.And if those attempts are poorly executed, like everything in these books, it’s ok to say it sucks. Don’t give Cline a participation trophy just for “trying” lmao
I’m asking what they actually want the guy specifically to do differently and give specifics beyond “stop being problematic.”.Isn’t “problematic” a wonderfully flexible, non-specific word.
Yes but it’s saying “The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men” when that’s not a core problem of any one book. It’s a core problem, perhaps, of geek literature writ large, but that’s not a problem within one book.
How is that problem to be addressed if not one book at a time?
At the production level, of course. You can, say, legitimately accuse Hollywood of not making enough robust roles for Hispanic people. It’s seriously a problem. For all the concern over Black actors, Hispanic actors are far less visible despite representing more of America. I think most people (on the Left at least) would agree broadly with that point. BUT that doesn’t mean it makes sense for me to take a single movie, say, Happiest Season, and complain it doesn’t have any Hispanic people in it.
If you want to criticize an industry, do, but individual works of art can’t legitimately be held to such criticism.
I don’t think the first book has one singular problem.
That being said, a lot of people read it, including me, so maybe Cline could stand up to snuff if he was somehow able to eschew the self-indulgence.
I haven’t read the book but wasn’t this addressed head-on in the movie that the creator of the Oasis was an emotionally and socially arrested 80s kid, a loner who basically filled his life with the pop culture of the era? And his obsessions were adopted by the people trying to solve the riddles in order to improve their chances of winning?
Now that may indeed correspond with Cline’s personal interests, but there’s an acknowledged reason for those references within the story.
If his only options are to write what he knows or fail at writing slightly outside his experience, he deserves pointed criticism. The idea that he’s immune to criticism because he lacks imagination is kind of a weird defense. More broadly, “write what you know” is only a valid ethos if you’re willing to supplement your offhand knowledge with research. It doesn’t make a person’s knowledge inherently literary, and it doesn’t justify an inability to write anything outside of your immediate experience. More to the point, it’s an inspirational cliche for aspiring writers who don’t know where to begin, not a governing principle of fiction writing.
True, but what did they expect? A story written about the experience of being a black nerd in the 80’s and 90’s? It’s just seems odd the reviewer thought it was necessary to point out the obvious as if being a cis white nerd is what ruined the book as opposed to why it really sucks. Also, at least among the geek PoC I’ve known my whole life, a lot of their interests overlap with “white geek culture”. Anime, video games, Fantasy, etc.
I don’t think “but I’m white” is an adequate defense. No one’s saying that Cline needs to suddenly make a rousing novel about the “Black experience in America,” but I think if you’re gonna make it as an author, you probably should have some level of self-awareness.
And also be good. Like you should be good at the thing you’re making money from.he clearly attempts to move beyond straight white guy nostalgia.As someone who read this book through…nefarious means (Basically people shitting on it on twitter made me seek it out): He does try! He just fails miserably because Cline is too much of a dunce to connect things like social media and the all-invasive VR tech feature in the novel. There’s literally a moment in which Wade discovers how evil social media is and goes on about how social media might potentially be the thing that kills humanity—and yet the book is still about how gaming is awesome, how Wade is the world’s savior, and the book ends with Wade suggesting that even though the world is still a shitshow—at least the people have Oasis!
The problem isn’t that Cline is white—it’s that he’s a fucking moron who has no self-awareness who managed to fail up to make a shit ton of money. His concessions to tolerance feel less like he’s actually trying to work these things out and more like he’s placing it there just to shut his critics up.
I get what you’re asking, and I think the answer is essentially he just has to be a better writer. The problem isn’t that he’s trying to use what references an 80s girl would like, it’s that he’s still just using references.
Aye. He can’t win, and that’s by design. It’s almost as if people like Samantha Nelson who, occupying a privileged and powerful position as a media writer, feel as if they’re the ones who get to dictate what others should read and like. It’s always sad to see people whose international audience consists of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pairs of eyeballs, try to make out they’re being marginalised.Don’t get me wrong. I can’t fucking stand the premise of RP1 – it’s pretty much everything bad about nerd culture: derivative, thinks itself smarter than it is, disrespectful to others’ creative works, and yeah, painfully neckbearded. Self-indulgent and self-righteous. But outside of proposing that straight, white men not be allowed to have books published anymore I’m not really sure what you want the poor guy to do….and it’s almost as if the calls about “problematic” cultural items isn’t about the items themselves, but merely as a stalking horse to put certain groups who happen to generate those items the writer doesn’t like in their place for reasons that have nothing to do with the item.Writer does something bad, like RP1? “This book is bad and shouldn’t be published.”Writer takes that criticism on board and attempts to address it, like RP2? “Nope, still bad.”I’m an Asian dude whose spent more time than most in the literary world (OK, so it’s the Australian literary world, but we’re trying, dammit), and I’ve run into enough people like Samantha. With me they come at it from the other end of the identity politics stick – “Why don’t you write more about being Asian?” because it’s something people like her, who have a disproportionate amount of power in the publishing world (white, urban middle-class women): an Other to fetishise, an exotic novelty.Lord knows there’s some problematic shit you could call Ernie out for – his cringeworthy porno poetry that definitely falls into the “But I’m objectifying women in the right way” category.
Agree. This is the terrible box some try to put writers into. They write what they know and people criticize it for lack of representation. They try to have representation and they turn around and attack you for appropriating something that is not you. These guys do this for a living. What is he supposed to do? He probably actually made a mistake trying to address it and just rake in the dough and do what you do. Most people do not care. This isn’t Shakespeare.
People don’t get attacked when they do their homework and do representation well. Matt Ruff, a white man, wrote Lovecraft Country which has Black protagonists and centers on racial violence in America. He’s been widely praised. It’s when you fuck it up that you get criticized, but that’s literally how literary criticism works.
Literally how all criticism works, not just literary.
well, then the argument is how in the world do you know if “you fuck it up”? Yes, it is much easier when your entire premise, like “Watchman” is racial prejudice. He specifically did this to try to make up for a criticism in the first book, but people are saying it isn’t good enough. How do you win?
It took me literally two seconds to google and find some advice for writers. There’s tons of resources for writers who want to write about marginalized groups and other cultures. It’s not about “winning” it’s about doing your goddamn job as a writer, taking responsibility for what you create, and the stories you want to tell. So you do your homework, do your best, and realize no one is above criticism.
FYI, Writing the Other is also a great repository to direct people towards!
https://writingtheother.com/And yeah it costs money but no one here is gonna convince me Cline couldn’t afford both one of their sessions -and- a sensitivity reader.
Tolkien must be a virulent racist for having only white hobbits, elves and dwarves and dark-skinned Orcs.
From the sound of the review, it’s barely an effort. It’s like the GURL POWER moment from Endgame. Superficial at best, masking a lack of interest in actual improvement at worst.
I don’t think that’s a contradiction. The focus purely on Cline’s personal nostalgia – which is very specifically that of a boilerplate cishet white man of his demographic – is a limitation of his work. Saying he’s trying to move past it with John Hughes and Sailor Moon isn’t saying he’s succeeding. From what I’ve seen, it’s still a fantasy world based on his personal nostalgia and limited perspective, with a sprinkling of nostalgia he was vaguely aware girls he knew might like.Though, honestly, I don’t think this kind of reference-overwhelmed fiction would work anyway, no matter how broad he’s drawing from or how diverse he’s trying to get. I find it excruciating and I’m exactly in the nerd demographic he’s pandering to.
Oh! It’s all about white men and their hangups, and how other people relate to the white main character. Kinda like an Updike novel. I give it two pulitzers and a think piece in GQ.
But I definitely don’t think it’s fair to go after him from the identity
politics angle given that he clearly is making an effort here.
To paraphrase another piece of 80s kitsch: Identity politics. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
“But outside of proposing that straight, white men not be allowed to have books published anymore” I’d like to propose that straight, white men stop responding to every form of criticism with outlandish persecution fantasies like this one.
I’d like to propose that A). you stop labeling everyone who disagrees with you as a straight white man (I’m only two of those things, I’ll let you guess which); and B). you actually read what I wrote instead of attacking me for a perceived complaint about “cancel culture.” I swear, the anti-cancel culture people are just as annoying as cancel culture people.Since you were lazy and clearly didn’t read my other posts, I’m going to be lazy too and just re-post something I wrote already: I
used the intentionally ludicrous example of white guys never getting a
book deal again to highlight what I see is a flaw of viewing everything
through the lens of identify politics. It seems to me that this is push for us to require our art (and I really
struggle to consider this book “art”, but you get my point) to tackle
issues relating to diversity and representation, but there’s this other
push to attack people for “cultural appropriation” or “not understanding
the [group] experience” when somebody does attempt to do that. This is
the same, equally dumb situation that went down with American Dirt: a
writer attempted to explore and humanize Mexican immigrants and she got
criticized for both stealing their story and not being qualified to
tell it because of her own ethnic background.And to bring this back to my intentionally silly example: unless we only allow books to be published from writers that only stick to characters of the same sex/gender/orientation, this tension is still going to exist.
Thanks for reading. Now you can go back to labeling me as some MAGA-hat wearing troglodyte who probably drives with a bullhorn to yell at random women to smile more.
The problem here isn’t one of lack of wokeness. It isn’t that a white man is writing about what a white man knows – that’s perfectly OK. It’s that the book suggests a world created and inhabited by so many different people would come down to what a white man knows. This COULD be both explained and made very interesting by acknowledging that the creator of the Oasis was a white man, add to that an autistic white man. And a good writer would work from that to show both the frustration and the annoyance of those who are not white autistic men, in coping with this world. But Cline is not a good writer and he does not recognise this interesting opportunity to dive into both, the psyche of autistic people who often seek safety and solace in controllable things they know (a video game populated by familiar pop cultural references, anyone?) and the people who need to cope with consequences of someone’s mental condition (everyone playing this game). While watching Ready Player One, I, a mentally pretty much sound slavic woman, couldn’t help but form in my head same sentences quoted here from Sorrento’s dialogue in the RP2 book. Why is all this pop cultural garbage so important to these people? They have a game in which they can create anything, be anything, do anything: why do they choose only to re-enact the existing stuff? Halliday’s situation is understandable, his creation is populated only by things familiar to him, because unfamiliar things would upset an autistic man. But why are ALL the other characters, except Sorrento, apparently willing to accept this autistic behavior and not ever turn away from emulating 80ies pop culture and create their own original stuff? The only answer here is: because Cline is a bad writer.
Art3mis, who dumps him after just 10 days I hope the book takes the time to point out the tragic similarity between this and that classic of geekdom, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.
Which is worse, the two writers came up with the same idea or Cline plagiarized Paul Blart 2.
I believe you mean “homage” to one of cinema’s great masterpieces.
Of course how silly of me.
“I think you’ll find Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 came out at least 25 years too late to be one of cinema’s great masterpieces, all of which debuted in the ‘80s, obviously.”
-some secondary character that exists solely to back up our hero
Wade’s younger step-brother, a fan of 2000’s pop-culture, also known as a “Blartie”.
I wasn’t really ready to get RPT even though I liked RPO. That Cline basically dumped Artemis from the get go definitely makes me not want to get RPT. I read Armada too and it was basically a slightly reworked RPO.
Well hold on… Cline only knows 80s and 90s culture. So he was probably attempting to rip off Karate Kid 2.
If you don’t already listen to the podcast ‘Til Death Do Us Blart, you really should check it out.
I’ve seen the movie, I think even the whole thing. It’s weird that I have no memory at all of the ending to a Steven Spielberg movie (and I’m 99% sure I’ve seen the whole thing) but I hated that movie. Haaaaaaated it. It baffles me that the book it was based on was even published, let alone that it was successful enough to get a movie adaptation directed by Steven Fucking Spielberg.
A lot of people seem to like “Hey, remember this?!” cheap, empty nostalgia …
This won’t be the nail in the coffin of “nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia” entertainment, but it would be nice if it were.
That explains Jimmy Fallon’s popularity. He pretends to have nostalgia for things he was way to old to have nostalgia for, unless he was actually a 25 year old man watching All That in the 90s.
Nowadays, hacky late night show hosts are basically cheerleaders, cheering on what everyone else is already happy about instead of contributing to the culture.
That’s been true since Leno first got The Tonight Show.
very true – I enjoyed it enough based on just that. while my kids have no clue about 90% of the references made.
It’s definitely endemic to Gen-Xers.
All I remember from the book is the protagonist stalking his girlfriend after they break up and the part of the climax when he has to quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail verbatim.
Wow, and I thought the movie improved on the book in nearly every way. Artemis has more to do, the challenges aren’t just about rote memorization, and Halliday is more of a socially awkward nerd than the self-centered jerk the book paints him as. The book is a great premise undermined by terrible writing. The movie is at least competent.
super funny to me that, while i know this is dreadfully nitpicky, there isn’t even a player two, and it’s just wade again.
It’s like when you want to play Galaga, but other people are waiting to use the machine, so you put in two quarters and press two players and then just play as both players.
“I recognized this game. It was called Galaga, originally published in 1981. It involved shooting down hordes of aliens inside a space ship. I had a pretty high score, but not as high as the high scores I had in games like Missile Code, Defender, Centipede, and Asteroids Deluxe, which are also arcade games originally published in 1981. I know many things about arcade games published in the early 80s and also the late 80s too. Trans rights.”—excerpt from Ready Player One or Two or Whatever, probably.
It’s like he’s saying what we’re all thinking, and what we’re all thinking is both banal and unpleasant!
This comment belongs on the dust jacket.
I hope someone got fired for that blunder!
Just like Ocean’s Thirteen doesn’t have 13 team members
But it’s still set in the sea, right?
sure, but ‘player two’ is at least an expression. this should have gone the teen wolf route and been ‘ready player, too’
This.
To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this shit but you can’t read it.
Ready Player Two reads like a fusion between a Wikipedia page and a video game walk-throughSo, it’s the first book again?Cline seems more concerned with explaining how everything works and sharing trivia than telling a good story.Yep, it definitely is.
Probably the most interesting up thing about RP2 is that somebody’s been doing DMCA takedowns on tweets criticizing parts of the book.Lindsay Ellis does a pretty good Twitter Thread on probably one of the most fucked up parts of the bookAlso, the book ends up ripping off the plot of Sword Art Online. In fact, Cline even writes multiple characters saying “The is just like Sword Art Online!”. So it’s best to just skip both franchises and watch Sword Art Online Abridged. It’s SAO but it’s good.
I had a hard time finding a quote because there’s too many good ones, so here’s one of the best SAO Abridged quotes:
Yes, there’s plenty of problematic shit in his books but Cline’s biggest issue is that he’s just a punishingly bad writer. I’m not certain he even understands what writing is, beyond the regurgitation of trivia. Ready Player One was little more than an “I Love the 80s” novelization.
This exactly. They’ve started covering the book on the 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back podcast, and the bits they read verbatim are just jaw-droppingly awful. Like junior high-level writing. How on earth did Cline get published?
How on earth did Cline get published?
The book sold a whole lot of copies and the movie adaptation’s gross tripled its (substantial) budget, so I don’t think you can fault the publisher’s instincts on that one.I guess we’re left to blame the American public. Yet again.
No, but I mean the first time, because Ready Player One also sucks.
It does. And yet it sold a lot of copies. So when you ask how it got published, the answer is “a publisher thought it would sell a lot of copies”. They were correct.
Turns out middle aged white guys like a book that tells them that all the things they liked as kids/young adults were cool.Looks in mirror.Shit.
It’s the only major piece of media celebrating the culture of cosplay and internet gaming on such a large scale.
I found the movie depressing as hell but it clearly speaks to people, god knows how.
It doesn’t celebrate shit. It’s a dude reading off a list of things he remembers existed while looking up each time with Pun Dog eyes hoping you’ll applaud how smart he is.
It seems to be working…I knew a guy who loved Tron: Legacy. He prolly likes this too.
You should know, buh-lurred lines defends the Kenosha Shooter and seems to think China deliberately created COVID.
Yeah, that about tracks.
– Nostalgia sells, big time- It’s the 80s turn to be cool- People like feeling smart by recognizing references
You forgot: “It’s a fun read”
I bought and read it. I hadnt read reviews of it at the time, an acquaintance recommended it and the premise sounded interesting. The execution was bad, and I will never take a recommendation from that person again. I read through the whole thing and by the time I finished it I was actively hating the book. Then I was dumb, a friend invited me to go see the movie. I thought “Hey, Spielberg is directing, maybe he will do something fun with this”, and that was more of my time wasted that I will never get back.Now I will not read this second novel, but here I am commenting on a thread about it. More time of my life wasted.Moral of the story, Fuck you Ernest Cline.
My sister and I enjoy hate-watching things and we went to see the movie because it looked like garbage. When Wade yelled at the villain, “YOU KILLED MY MOTHER’S SISTER” we both burst out laughing.
That’s a great podcast, and I’m excited that they’ve started covering the sequel. I love how Mike and Connor are able to articulate Cline’s awful crutches that he keeps falling back on, like the narrator constantly being aware of and commenting on his own reactions.
Same way Seth McFarlane got multiple shows on Fox. People liked things they recognize.
Member Berries 2
The fundamental problem with these kinds of nostalgic “geek-sploitation” soft sci-fi stories is that they often imagine a near-future in which what is considered “retro chic” today is still treated with the same fondness decades from now. Imagine if this were a novel set in 2020, but one in which our popular culture is obsessed with reliving a vision of American culture from over 68 years ago, like 1952 was an absolute golden age annnnnd……..as I write this I realize I just described the animating force behind much of the MAGA cult.
Feh! I have to imagine nothing, Ernest Cline has nothing on Miniver Cheevy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44978/miniver-cheevy
It’s like these people learned nothing from The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.
Wasn’t the implication supposed to be that in the semi-post-apocalyptic future of the story things had been kind of shitty for the last twenty years so people remain fixated on the pop culture of the 20th Century because it reflected a time before the world went to shit…. as I say it this vision of the future is suddenly seeming more plausible.
Perhaps this is something mentioned in the book that I totally missed or have forgotten over the years, but I think it’s being charitable. If there was any intentional implication that this was the rationale (Cline doesn’t seem to follow the old adage to “show, not tell”), I still don’t find it all that plausible. The dual crises of the Great Depression and World War II did not hamper popular cultural production, even anything it spurred greater output and creativity.
The way around the MAGA shit is to talk about TNG, where all the characters love specifically media from the antiquities to the 1980s, full stop. Given that the show is set in 2364, you’d think they’d at least once like a thing from the 2100 or 2200s. Like I know, those years were supposed to be sucky war stuff, but so were the 40s and yet somehow they still generated well-regarded culture 400 years later.
I do think it’s a bit much to expect anybody writing about the future to also spontaneously invent creme-da-la-creme bits of culture from the fictional intervening periods.Like, shit, I’m writing about the 23rd century so now I gotta fuckin’ invent like sixteen different musical trends from five different planets so I don’t look like a hack. Quick, somebody get me that program that can write new Bach pieces, and, uh, make it drop acid I guess?
Oh it’s easy because you just follow the other TNG example, the ol’ “Two humans and a Gleep” where when you need to cite an example, you just say “One of history’s great composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, or Tr’Bindulon!” Instant cred for dropping a weird alien name, probably from a recent century! And still get the point across just fine.
That’s a very good example of how to handle a limited repertoire of allusions to recent pop culture properly. Writers should ask themselves; who would be the contemporary analogue for the futuristic characters I’m imaging? What sort of character, if I were setting my story in the present, would have an encyclopedic knowledge of art and culture from 70, 100, or 400 years ago? I agree that TNG gets it right, because Picard and the rest, all highly educated members of Starfleet, treat mid-to-late-twentieth century pop culture as charming antiquity.
The closest anyone gets on Star Trek to doing it right is on DS9 where Sisko was into baseball not just in the 40s (though also then) but in like the mid to late 2100s.TNG wusses out and invents a whole game that not only does no one ever get to see (Parisi’s Squares) but doesn’t really set up how it might also have a strong cultural following and celebrities and so on.
TNG thankfully phased that out pretty quickly. Meanwhile Voyager went all in on it with Tom Paris, as their resident 20th Century fanboy. Thing is, a lot happened in the 20th Century. Is he a fan of Prohibition era? The sixties? Does he long for the days of swinging in the sexy seventies?
Even then you get really stupid moments, like finding the old Ford truck and having him look it over. “We’re looking for a small metal thing called a ‘key’.” Asshat, they HAVE keys in the future!
It is kind of weird right?
Like take Deep Space Nine for example, Julian & O’Brien’s reoccurring hang is to fight at the Alamo so it’s not like war reenactment is off limits as far as human oriented socially acceptable hangs are
Big shocker, Ernest Cline can’t write for shit. Well at least the MST3K people will have with there book podcast. Also you name dropped Strange Days but not Sword Art Online? The stupid anime the characters keep referring at will?
This line from SAO Abridged just got extremely meta…
Oh my god I feel like I’m in some horrible pop culture cycle……like the Matrix crossed with the Simpson’s. OH FUCK that’s just Homer Cubed from Treehouse of Horror… which references Tron…
SAO Abridged has no right to be as good as it is considering the source material it has to work with.
Honestly, I think it’s because most of SAO is so bad that SAO abridged is as good as it is.
Most of it feels like they looked at a good idea that was squandered in the show and said, “How can we make that good?”The amazing thing is that it not only is absolutely hysterical, but also does drama much better than the original show did, too.
Way to rip off a Simpsons joke.
I’m trying to figure out which is worse: that the entire plot of RP2 is just the first season of SAO and Cline refuses to acknowledge this or that he’s never seen SAO and just happened to copy its entire set-up
What’s the book podcast you’re referring to please? Thanks!
It’s called 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back. They covered RP1 first, then Armada, then a bunch of other books (I stopped listening to it for a while), and now they’re back to cover RP2 and it’s wonderful.
Thanks!! I’m excited for this.
I heard there weren’t any advance copies sent to critics, which was maybe the first clue this was going to be a steaming turd. Not that I had any expectations. Cline is a terrible, juvenile writer. And I can’t figure out who these books are for. I’m Generation X—Cline is just a year and change older than me—and I don’t want to read a collection of I Love the ‘80s outtakes loosely held together with “plot”. It’s like being elbowed in the ribs over and over again by some smug jackass going “Eh? Eeeeeeh??”
Hmm, I found Ready Player One hugely entertaining (note: as a kid I watched Ghostbusters in the theaters 4 times, which might be telling…) and the plot was pretty solid as a singular construct from beginning to end… it was an easy read, like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code for us sci-fi/computer games geeks. Not brilliant writing, stereotypical 80’s movie heroes perhaps from a white male perspective – but it worked as a mystery sugarcoated with nostalgia for geeks.
Spielberg’s movie was “meh” and Armada was already too much of the same with little evolution and too much ripped off from the influences the book referenced… so I’m not salivating over this sequel. But the first book definitely hit my juvenile heart.
RP1 did seem to have some originality under all the references.Armada was just a straight ripoff of it’s references.
Yes, it’s the literary equivalent of Nuts & Gum, good point.
I read the first one and found the idea fun, but the execution lacking. I thought the hunts were clever enough to think if i knew some more of the subject matter i might have figured them out a bit better. But the book had its obvious warts and deserves its criticism. Reading this one- yeah, bad. bad all around. Everything felt meta, self deprecating, tryhard, self indulgent and stick it to the haters all at once. After the first macguffin gets found, the rest felt rushed. Like playing a game with a walkthrough. I knew the book wasn’t for me, but I wondered where it would go. Like you, idk who it would be for besides Cline himself.
RP1 was a weird book as it was written for a 14 year old who has the memories of a 45 year old. I was in the later age group and wondered how a YA target market could get any pleasure from the references from my childhood. Meanwhile I’m struggling with Cline’s lack of basic writing skills.
So you’re saying you won’t read my Singles/Reality Bites cross-over novella that I self-published in a zine?
There were a lot of parts of the book that baffled me, but the notion that “filmsyncing” (memorizing a movie so you can act it out beat for beat) would become a popular form of recreation is just beyond belief. The entire scene of Wade filmsyncing “Wargames” is like watching the movie over Cline’s shoulder with him periodically turning to you to say, “Isn’t this a good movie?”. Yes, and if I wanted to watch it, I’d watch it.
the notion that “filmsyncing” (memorizing a movie so you can act it out beat for beat) would become a popular form of recreation is just beyond belief..Rocky Horror…?
That’s barely a movie.
I just want him to take a single Creative Writing class. One semester. Hell, a weekend workshop on the fundamentals of storytelling. The man cannot sustain drama without immediately undermining it. He can’t even do basic setup and payoff. Like, hacky sci fi prose is fine; not everyone is William Gibson. But when you don’t have the ability to effectively introduce *complications* into a narrative, even after being called out on it numerous times, maybe you need to reconsider your career choices.(And yet he made millions of dollars, so what the fuck do I know?)I get why people liked RP1, I really do, but it’s some of the worst prose I’ve ever read in a published novel. It’s like being forced to read an abridged dictionary of 80s bullshit. I think only E. L. James is a worse successful writer than Ernest Cline.
I passed on the first one after reading an excerpt that made my head hurt. And I’m not some literary snob above an airport or beach read.
Stephanie Meyer has the exact same problem and yet the two of them made a bazillion dollars.At least JK Rowling, for her noteworthy faults, basically understands how drama works.
I only read the first HP book but I thought her writing was garbage and hacky as well. The existence of Harry Potter whatever irritates me. I haven’t read RP1 but for those who did and were annoyed by it, imagine a whole fucking franchise complete with theme parks based on it and your kids being taught it in middle school “just to get them to read SOMETHING.”
I mean HP1 gets an EASY pass because it is a kids’ book and reads exactly like a kids’ book.By the time you get to the 5th and she’s well aware of an adult following too it’s inexcusably badly plotted.
Nah, fuck that. Just because adults get interested in something aimed at children doesn’t mean the books should then aim towards them and abandon the core audience. They all read like children’s books – admittedly ones that step into more mature themes as they go – because they are *all* children’s books and plotted as such. I’m not saying they’re above criticism but on those terms – “Well, why isn’t she aiming them at the adults who read them?” is a nonsensical one.
The best thing those movies did was take a belt-sander to those plots and streamline their narratives. Pages and pages of convoluted exposition were reduced to a single sentence.
“Here’s a ring that was evil that’s not evil anymore. Everybody got that? Let’s move on…”
Read one Twilight book and RP1 to learn that JKR is something entirely different (i.e. actually competent at her craft). And I’m not now, and never was, a fan of hers.
It’s not a mystery why Stephenie Meyer made a bazillion dollars. The Twilight trilogy was written in bad prose with a lot of problematic stuff (lead example being the boyfriend/future husband who watches the heroine sleep before they’re even dating and wants to eat her until the moment he mercy-kills her). However, it was atmospheric, propulsively plotted, and had a fairly compelling love triangle. Chaucer was not wrong about what women want.
“Propulsively plotted”? Wha? There is not enough plot and very little drama in any of it. Bad guys enter late and leave early; conflicts usually dribble to their deaths in a damp puddle of talky talk. Nothing much happens until she finally marries Edward, then immediately becomes a vampire and has a vampire baby in a truly deranged, surprisingly compelling sequence; then after that there’s a bunch more anticlimactic nothing where it seems like everyone’s in danger but they’re really not. The End.
Atmosphere and love triangle, I’ll give you.
I found it enough of a page turner to get me through some long flights. The End.
Funny you mention Gibson, as I think reading Neuromancer would have taught him that you don’t have to stop and explain every little bit of tech to a reader; they can figure it out from context. (The fact that the character ends up sleeping in a ‘coffin’ just like at the Cheap hotel, but doesn’t mention ‘just like the Cheap Hotel in 1984’s Hugo and Nebula winning Neuromancer by William Gibson” makes me pretty sure Cline did not in fact read much of anything.)
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. See, televisions (TVs) with no active feed often display ‘noise’, which is gray, which is what the sky was. That is, it was overcast. The clouds where covering the blue part. Noise is a random dot pixel pattern of static displayed when no transmission signal is obtained by the antenna receiver of television sets and other display devices. Ports are
“The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white me”lol yes the book would have been much better if the author threw in references to john waters and disco
Hey! I’m a cishet white male and I love both John Waters AND Disco!
Except Waters was MIA for the bulk of the 80s and even then, Polyester came and went without much buzz while Hairspray came out in 1988, it again was only a modest hit and didn’t become a huge pop cultural thing until the early 90s, when WGN and Fox started airing it non-stop.
Also, disco was 100% rebranded simply “dance/pop” music in the 1980s and you had a rather substantial disconnect from “classic” disco and stuff by Madonna, Erasure, Depeche Mode, and other “dance” acts who made a huge deal about how they weren’t your father’s disco, especially since you had “going to the disco” fall out of favor in slag in favor of “going to the club/clubbing”.
As such, if you are going to do a nostalgia porn story ala RP1, you’d have to set it in the 90s to include John Waters into the mix. Waters didn’t make a proper comeback and break into the mainstream until the 90s as far as Hairspray/Crybaby developing their rabid fanbases in the 90s when they hit first run syndication on TV and a lot of Water’s older stuff finally seeing the light of day on DVD (including Pink Flamingos getting a big anniversary re-release and that late 90s documentary on Divine).
“Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past generation’s nostalgia?” Ready Player One’s primary villain, Nolan Sorrento, asks this of the protagonists of Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline’s sequel to his 2011 debut novel. “The entire OASIS is like one giant graveyard, haunted by the undead pop-culture icons of a bygone era. A crazy old man’s shrine to a bunch of pointless crap.”
Wait, and this guy’s supposed to be the VILLAIN?
It’s a shit-writer tactic, cleverly writing your critics into your story as the villain.
G O T ‘ E M
Is it, though? Isn’t it necessary to give the villain his due? At this point, are people just trying to tear Kline apart for kicks?
It kind of is, yeah. Specifically, I’m thinking of Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water” as another example.
How about “Man and Superman” in which the devil-as-critic shits over the pretensions of Shaw’s surrogate figure? The problem isn’t the trope. It’s how it is used. If the author is genuinely self-aware and allows the villain to score legitimate points, I don’t see the problem. I just feel we’re hating for the sake of hating. Reading this comments section, I am reminded by Frank Constanza’s Festivus celebrations where he sitting around the table and telling everyone how useless they are.
Sorrento: You idiots spend too much time in the virtual world. Heroes: [defeat Sorrento] I think the lesson here is we spend too much time in the virtual world.
That’s a valid arc, though. Great villains often have a good point but try to enforce it through immoral means (I have no idea if that’s the case in RP2, but Sorrento had no problem with mass murder in the first book, so I assume that carries over here). Killmonger in Black Panther comes to mind. His grievances are very legitimate, and he even sways the heroes to change. The problem is in his methods. Thanos, too, for that matter. He’s right that life in the universe is very often evil, but that’s one messed up solution.
WE’RE NOT SO DIFFERENT YOU AND IlolI hear you especially re: Killmonger, who I still feel big picture-wise was right. Not sure if I can put Sorrento in that category. Full disclosure, I did not read the book, but watched (and hated) the movie and found Sorrento to be an amalgamation of every 80s movie villain, grown up. Which of course made me uncomfortable because… I did find myself identifying with him? There was one particular scene where I think he was meant to sound especially evil and he just sounded… grounded in the real world. But the rest of the movie was so damn sloppy and frustrating it feels like any shades of complexity in Sorrento’s character had to be a mistake rather than clever development. But yea I don’t want to like blow up apartment complexes or whatever.
I agree. We’re not so different, you and I.
That villian makes some great points! It reminds me when I was a kid and old execs would push the last generations nostalgia on us like we would understand who the hell any of these characters are. I spent hours trying to figure out what special powers or connections Dick Tracy had before realizing he was just some guy in yellow that shoots first and kills the bad guys.
Yes.The conflict in Ready Player One is between the villain as representative of boring square business adults against the young and scrappy geeky kids. So a lot of his viewpoint is just sane things that rational adults would say, with a bit of unnecessary murder added in. It’s hokey and cliche as any lame 80s movie. Which is suspect was unintentional from Cline, but is part of the magic that made the book work for those who like it.Although I really wish he’d dialed down on the murder and left it on a more reasonable conflict between naive youth and cynical adulthood.
That was one of the hilarious things about the worldbuilding of RP1, IIRC. Sorrento is the head of an all-powerful company that has slavery camps around the country, uses mercenaries, bombs and murder to ‘negotiate’ with an 18 year old…and then just gets arrested at the end. The whole time the world seems like this lawless place and the victory over the badguy boils down to “Wait, why didn’t you just call the cops earlier if that was an option?”
Ready Player One was a “flash in the pan” sort of YA novel, a lot of people got exposed to it thanks to Loot Crate, it somehow got attached to Spielberg, and now I think it’s OK to move on.If you liked it, great. If you read it all the way through and then realized that you’re an adult man reading YA novels and that you jump at every opportunity to dissect it when it comes up on the interwebs, well… Look I just want to be cool like you guys.
I view it like the recent Star Wars trilogy. It wasn’t really written for me. I can love it or hate it or somewhere in between (is that allowed anymore) but I can’t complain if it doesn’t meet my adult expectations.
But it _is_ written for adult expectations.Its not a children’s story, despite the age of the protagonist. It’s gross wish fulfilment for the author twinned with lazy listing of shit the author likes aimed squarely at the kind of unhealthy, unself-critical geek manchild that Cline obviously is.
listen to the audio book. it’s horrific.
I think that’s a good way to look at it.
I’m in my 30’s, granted I do apply my adult expectations to Daniel Tiger from time to time.
You forgot the audio book. Wil Wheaton’s toxic ass read the audio book back before we found out that Wheaton really is a piece of shit human being, which helped the book spread like a herpes outbreak at a BLM riot.
I hadn’t heard anything bad about Wheaton.
I also find it very baffling how someone like Cline can spend years of his life, writing two novels, on 1980s culture, a subject which he presumably is very interested in, yet has nothing to say about the ways in which popular culture interacts, influences, and is influenced by politics, economics, and society. He views his favorite movies, television programs, video games, and music (although it seems he is not very interested in music, which may be telling) all as existing in a vacuum, completely removed from the realities of the Reagan/Thatcher regimes, the criminal AIDS and crack crises, the rise of the modern police state and carceral state, evangelical Christian extremism coming to power, the disintegration of the labor movement, so on and so on. As suppose there is some hint at acknowledgement of the deindustrialization of the American rust belt in the first novel, but he fails to draw in meaningful connections, or to even show awareness that much the modern dystopia he envisions people living in the near future has its root causes in the decade he so enshrines in a nostalgic halo. Cline seems to be a remarkably shallow thinker and incurious and disinterested writer.
Incurious is (as Ernest Cline would say) the perfect word for it. I mean, this is a guy whose book is set in a dystopia that he never bothers to explain between excruciating, repetitive infodumps about the OASIS (which is ALSO vaguely defined, somehow). He’s also really obsessed with peak oil rather than climate change.
he does that because peak oil is a real threat to society and climate change is made up bullshit, a rebranding of the great lie that was “global warming” when that turned out to be nothing but fake ass fear mongering.
I liked RP1 and am generally inclined to defend it, but this is a really good point.
For me, the book’s main problem is a lack of any larger context. Nobody ever asks what the point of memorizing all of this 80s pop culture is. You’d think that Wade would at some point confront the possibility that he won’t win the contest, and that he just watched/read/played/listened to all this stuff for nothing. I didn’t hate the book the way some people do. I have a soft spot for much of the pop culture that Cline adores. But it’s not a deep book by any stretch.
Cline himself doesn’t seem to be all that interested in introspection. It would be fine to write a novel about shallow characters (think Great Gatsby), but there is no hint that Cline is at all interested in understanding his own characters or in building an interesting world.
It’s a feature, not a bug. A lot of people read for escapism.
But it’s a book ABOUT escapism, and it was written after the 1980s. I don’t understand how noting that the art of the 80s was a response to its greasy cynical underbelly just as these kids are escaping into that art themselves to escape their own dystopia is a clear missed opportunity.
Heck, the fact that Cline doesn’t even turn any of his protagonists or tertiary characters into writers or artists themselves, inspired to create instead of consume, AS HE HIMSELF DID, shows the lack of even self-awareness he has here. Like, he wrote a book about the entire planet trying to relive Steven Spielberg films and nobody in the book actually wants to become the next Spielberg, even while explicitly noting the shitty state of future art. Nope, Best Boy is “guy who remembers old shit real good”.
Heck, the fact that Cline doesn’t even turn any of his protagonists or
tertiary characters into writers or artists themselves, inspired to
create instead of consume.Well, I mean, to be fair the entire plot of the second book is driven by the story of Kira being the real creator behind much of the OASIS foundation worlds and adventures, as well as video games and art, based on her being inspired by her love of previous gamer and movie culture…
He probably is all of those things, but he picked the perfect setup so that it didn’t matter. His vision of the future is full of shallow, incurious, and disinterested people who’ve been effectively lobotomized by corporations (and by the mostly-free OASIS too, to be fair.) It’s also fairly plausible in that respect. Our country is already full of people who know little and understand even less, and who are actively discouraged by half of our political duopoly from knowing any inconvenient non-alternative-facts, let alone making any serious, academically-credible connections across history, politics, and culture.But seriously: pick a trend, pick a fad, pick a movement, pick a cultural moment. You’ll find fans of its output, both contemporary to it and contemporary to us, that have no clue.
One might even say that Cline is the one who likes all the pretty songs, likes to sing along and likes to shoot his gun, but don’t know what it means.
Well, yeah.It’s a shallow YA fantasy about a fake world that is artificially constructed to make 80s pop culture cool. The shallowness of the worldbuilding is both a weakness and a strength. If it tried to develop the world more or really delve into things it would be either boring or depressing or quite possibly both.As it is, it’s a light and fun romp which falls apart if you think about it too hard but stays relentlessly escapist so you don’t have to.
Cline views pop culture in a vacuum from itself. His characters know virtually nothing about any other pop culture. And his pop culture world is a world without any other people in it. No conventions, no mash-ups, no fan art, no fan fic. The characters know the dates everything was made, and there’s a conversation here they literally argue “LadyHawke is the best” “No, it sucks”. The author can’t even have his characters talk intelligently about their passions.
I think this is kind of the ideal rebuttal to all the people on this board parroting that cliche about writing what you know. If your knowledge is a catalog of popular things that other people can easily recognize, divorced from context, it’s not necessarily worth writing about. If you wanted to be pretentious, you could also say that you’re describing actual literature, which isn’t what this novel is. That doesn’t excuse its shortcomings, but it does suggest that hierarchical thinking about art has some basis in reality, in addition to the obvious elitism. As with so many things, mediocre white dudes saw the democratization of culture in the 20th century as an opportunity to succeed without trying.
Oh, he has plenty to say about it, it’s just that everything he says about it boils down to a white savior fantasy where every single political and social problem is solved by people playing video games. This theme just keeps coming up in the second book. Racism? Gone, because the Big Video Game made everyone appreciate each other. Homophobia? Gone, for the same reason. Transphobia? There’s like half a page where the narrator pats himself on the back for not hating trans people because he’s had sex with so many of them while inside the Big Video Game. Why, a couple of times he even gave himself a woman’s body in the game, for sex, so now he fully understands the trans experience! Enlightenment!
It turns out that the solution to everyone’s problems was to give lots of money to a white dude who loves video games. Why didn’t anyone think of that before?
RPO read like something made up by the writers on The Big Bang Theory as a filler joke.“Yes,” I thought to myself, flipping through to see if it got any better, “This is something insufferable, friendless nerds would probably enjoy.”
I’m not saying that people can’t learn and grow in terms of taste, but people seem to forget how much people loved Ready Player One when it came out, including The AV Club, which gave the book an “A.” I feel like that evolution is way more interesting as a phenomenon than talking about how good or bad the first book is.
I thought it was super interesting that twitter user Jacob Mercy live-tweeted the book the day it came out and mocked all the things this second book did poorly, claiming it failed to live up to the first book, even though the both suffer from the exact same issues
I can’t finish the second book. It’s dreck. But the main thing the first book had going for it was an antagonist. Book 2, from the 40% that I got through before returning to library, seems to have none. I’m not going to finish it, but my guess is Wade ends up destroying Oasis with the big red button to focus on the real world and stops creepily cyber-stalking Art3mis.
Ironically, the antagonist of the second book ends up being two characters from the first book, the minor one being the same antagonist as the first time. And no, neither of those things happens at the end.
I slogged through it. The action definitely ramped up in the second half. Still, all in all, not good. Not something I’d recommend to others who enjoyed RP1.
Oddly, this review doesn’t seem to even link to the AV Club’s review of the first book (at least that I can see). To a certain extent, the reviews aren’t incompatible: the first review ended with “But for readers in line with Cline’s obsessions, this is a guaranteed pleasure.” As it became more popular, it reached people for whom it worked less well, and the writing are eminently mockable.
(On the other hand, the exact way it’s mocked is kind of boring; the point was made a long time ago. Just like for a few years, every review of Stieg Larsson’s novels had to belabor how often brand names served as description and setting)
You aren’t counting for the fact that people mature and have different opinions as time progresses. The novel came out in my early 20’s, and I loved it initially, but I went through a modicum of personal growth over that time, and subsequent conversations on RP1, specifically over the lack of substance to the story, the lack of character to the supporting roster (especially female characters), the intrinsic logistical issues of a future society that only has pop culture references 30yrs old in real life, substandard prose, etc. It’s a serviceable YA novel, but RP1 doesn’t meet the standards of a Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, or Hunger Games.That said, you aren’t wrong- there’s an audience for this material as much as there is for Johnathon Safran Foer, Gillian Flynn, David Foster Wallace, Stephanie Meyer, or Kurt Vonnegut- all authors people love to ridicule for various reasons, despite not being the targeted audience.
“That said, you aren’t wrong- there’s an audience for this material as much as there is for Johnathon Safran Foer, Gillian Flynn, David Foster Wallace, Stephanie Meyer, or Kurt Vonnegut- all authors people love to ridicule for various reasons, despite not being the targeted audience.”That’s an interesting list of authors. JSF, I read Everything is Illuminated when it came out, liked it, loved the film, but when he came out with Extremely Close, I read the reviews and let them decide for me, and I think I made the right decision in not reading it. I still re-read DFW’s essay collections from time to time, as they do speak to a time in my life when I felt alive. I find it funny that I only got through half of Infinite Jest, but read all the footnotes (yes, all of them). Vonnegut is loved by such random members of my family, but while I know he’s an author that I should love, I just never really got into him aside from the random novel in college. Jonathan Franzen is one that I also find to divide critics. His The Corrections came out at the right time in life for me to appreciate. I had just finished reading it when going into counselling, and I remember that she asked if I was aware of it and being surprised that I had already read it. I tried reading it again probably 10 years later and couldn’t get even a quarter of the way into it. I’d moved on, and boy did it seem dated. I got (maybe?) halfway through the first Twilight movie and turned it off, my GF even said “I think this may be why I don’t read YA fiction anymore”. I find it funny that my oldest cousin (like almost ten years older) loves RPO. We are both somewhat geek-minded, but I read the first three chapters online before it was published and it was just lists of things that I either grew up with or was at least aware of. Never read the book, but figured I’d give the movie a try. I fell asleep probably 30 minutes in. This is not hate on Cline. Just like all the authors you and I mentioned, sometimes it really is just either love or indifference. Cline falls into the latter for me.TL:DR I just needed to vent a little. Thanks for the time.
Haha no worries, I appreciated the read. My correlation between them all is that they, Cline, and others often have the “It’s popular, now it sucks” treatment in common, regardless of any contrast in writing quality or subject material. I might dislike Cline nowadays, but he’s not committing a crime by writing books another might really enjoy.
I think it’s important to understand “when” RPO first came out, 2011, which I’d argue was at the height of “nerd acceptance” that kickstarted with the Marvel films. Basically, RPO was at the right place and at the right time.
But think about what happened since then: Gamergate, #MeToo, The Drumpf Years, fake news…all of these things served to create a more toxic place on the internet, something that led to people being far more critical of the novel. That, and I think it made people less tolerant of RPO’s obvious flaws: Wade was a piece of shit, and represented the very worst of nerd culture.
Also the fact that people who liked it in 2011 are 9 years older and people grow up a bit. I liked it then and their are aspects of it I still enjoyed but year, the world has not been kind to it
It’s hard to believe it took him nine years to write … this.
Also, RPO started out niche…which meant people drawn to it at first would likely be more receptive to its reference-based format and shitheel hero.Then, as people outside that circle started learning about the book, it was consumed by people less wowed by the references and who recognized the shitheel hero for what he was and found him completely off putting.
Honest question — you use the word “shitheel” twice in this comment: can you explain that part a little more, what makes him a shitheel? I have now read both books and I have no clue — since Cline seems to go out of his way to make the main character sympathetic, regardless of the book’s quality or lack thereof. In what ways is the character a shitheel?
Was it a great book? No. Was it fun? Yes. I don’t think it ever claimed to be anything more than exactly what it was.
Indeed. I don’t really get why people get so worked up about what is obviously a disposable novelty book that was never supposed to be taken that seriously.
Because EVERYTHING now days *must* conform to a unattainable and ever-changing “standard” of social & sexual politics, or else it gets dismissed, ridiculed, or piloried. Geez folks… it’s only a shallow, shitty attempt at a sequel. It needn’t deserve to be dissected & hyper-analyzed like it was Dostoyevsky or something!
I don’t really get why people get so worked up about what is obviously a
disposable novelty book that was never supposed to be taken that
seriously..Because it became very, very trendy to hate on his books. It’s like “My First Literary Criticism 101″ and has been since the first one. It’s just more rooted in how “problematic” he is now, which is ironic, since he seems to have bent over backwards in trying to fix that one issue, at least.
Maybe not, but the early readers who propped it up and continue to dismiss criticism of it absolutely do.
Maybe. I quickly got over the writing style by accepting that it’s written in the first person, and a nerdy teenage boy would write like that. After that I just found it a real page turner.
I quickly got over the writing style by accepting that it’s written in the first person, and a nerdy teenage boy would write like that.
I dunno if that’s really the praise of Ernest Cline that you think it is.
It wasn’t meant to be – my point was that it’s not that difficult to enjoy the book if you look at it that way.
Okay, but that’s not what RPO (or even most people who enjoy it) purports to be.Like, I can turn off my brain and enjoy stuff like Justice League and The Room…but BvS sucks because I was told by those making it that it was supposed to be more than a dumb popcorn movie.RPO is the latter. People simultaneously want me to turn off my brain, but then the book and it’s fans want to also claim that it’s some kind of smart commentary on pop culture or some celebration of nerdom instead of a Hot Topic shopping list.
I find age has a lot to do with how people read RPO. For me, it was a fun filled romp wrapped in a blanket of nostalgia. But I’m also old enough to have loved cloudy days when I lived in California, because I could watch Spectre-man, Johnny Soko and His Giant Robot, and The Space Giants.Why cloudy days? Because the signal from WGN Chicago would bounce the right way where we could watch it (again, in California). Cable? VHS? What are those?Now, would I teach this book in an English course that I taught? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Would I read it for fun? Sure. Who would I include in a modern Speculative Fiction Course? NK Jemisin, Patrick Rothfuss, probably Liu’s 3 Body Problem, and some Neil Gaiman.RPO was a book that was fitting to my personal tastes. I feel it’s at least worth a look. If you’ve looked at the book and disliked it, that’s fine too. It isn’t Shakespeare.
Is this satire? Because it reads like a page from the book.Also of course it isn’t Shakespeare. Lots of things aren’t Shakespeare. They also aren’t shit, either.
Sigh – my post wasn’t satire. I’m serious. And I’m very um loquacious.I used to watch Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot on the WGN channel when I lived with my parents in Married Officers Quarters on base in mid-California. WGN was based in Chicago, and was the first of the Turner network channels. In those pre-cable days, and with our rabbit ear antenna, we could only watch the channel on cloudy days because the signal got bounced down to us off the clouds.That’s the reason I enjoyed the book – it wasn’t hypothetical nostalgia for me, I saw all those tv shows and movies. I already knew that Captain Crunch was one of the first phone phreaks and got his name from the whistle in a Captain Crunch cereal box because they were a perfect 2600 Hz (which was also why the hacker zine 2600 has that title).If you want to read about this type of stuff, Cliff Stoll wrote The Cuckoo’s Egg which is all about his discovery of a hacker in Germany breaking into milnet, pretty much all pre-web.FWIW, I’ve also got a BA in English so there’s books I read critically and books I read for shits and giggles. If you want bad books, just go try and read some of the novels put out for RPGs – I’m looking at you Rifts Sonic Boom. Or, you can go read the Vampire Hunter D novels, but I suspect their issue is more translation quality than the actual writing. Stanislaw Lem had similar problems with translation, just not as bad as the Vampire Hunter D novels sometimes have.There’s a lot of writers that I like that I would consider to be “critically adequate” in the SciFi/Fantasy genre. They write for a living and that’s it. Cline fits easily on that list.
I don’t know anybody who claims that. My condolences.
I loved it then. I re-read it a few years ago and found that it wasn’t as fun as I remembered; on the re-read I found it bleak and kind of boring, and the references seemed a lot more rote than they had the first time. I got the ebook of “Ready Player 2″ from the library and read the first few pages last night, but again, it was like an 80s-reference parade with no real meaning or humor to it — just reference after reference for their own sake. I returned it about 5 minutes after I checked it out.
There are some pretty dismissive comments in that review right off the bat.
“I read this recently, and it was one of the few books I nearly gave up on. Terrible, terrible writing.. the sense that the writer didn’t really know how to construct a meaningful distopia in the real world. And, sorry, the whole book seemed to be a celebration of geek culture without any real sense of what made it worth celebrating”“It was impressive how the narrative kept pushing you forward, but the dialogue was atrocious.”“ I read some sample pages of the book online. This is from the very first page:
… [4 sentence quote]
And… I’m out. This book isn’t for me. (Actually, in fairness, I read a few more pages after this to be sure, but nothing won me over)“ “It sounds like the sort of quirky, geeky thing that would be made by a nerd who doesn’t know the difference between ‘clever’ and ‘intelligent.”“I was interested in this book, so I checked out a sample of the first three chapters. If I had been reading the actual book, I probably would have thrown it to the ground. I could see it maybe getting better once it gets going, but the opening is infuriating. The quality and quantity of exposition is infuriating. “
It’s almost like our tastes have changed during the past decade.
Well, I’m off to listen some Motley Crue and chug down a sixer of Zima. See ya’ on the flip side!
It’s hardly worse than the latter seasons of stranger things. Fun, nostalgia-fueled mindlessness. This just feels like another internet-fueled hate bandwagon situation. It was fine to like ready player one before the internet decided it wasn’t. I will pick this up too and share it with my teenaged son, because the first book was one of the few instances where I convinced him to read and he actually confessed to enjoying it (the only other resounding success being hitchhiker’s guide).
That’s an interesting point of comparison. I actually think Stranger Things got better after its first season, or at least justified itself, because it’s steered away from overt pastiche and more into character-driven genre storytelling. It’s not some mind-blowing character study, but it is grounded in tangible emotional conflict.
It kind of goes back and forth. The writers will let the actual plot take over entirely from time to time, but then they’ll be all like “oh crap, we forgot the 80s nostalgia dump for a bit there!”
How people view the book can easily change once they realize Cline is a one-trick pony.In short, it’s aged INCREDIBLY poorly.
I didn’t love it. I hated it with every fibre of my being, and I think less of people who do love it.
I think it’s perfectly poetic that RP1 received a burst of giddy, drunk, overly-positive reviews just like so many tentpole video games… and then came the hangover the next day. Sure, people could blame themselves and learn something… ooooor they could engage in some historical revisionism and scapegoat the booze manufacturer while they’re at it.
I hated the book then, and I hate the book now. One of only two books in my life that I have literally thrown across my room when finished. Outside of the first 40 or so pages that attempts to do a little world building, the rest is a collection of lists of pop culture that has absolutely nothing to say about pop culture and Mary Sue blandness.
the book is also very fun to read until it’s over and then you go ‘hey wait a minute…’
Yeah it was a pretty dumb but fun ‘ …that geeky 80s reference you like’ the novel, where enthusiasm made up for a lack of stylish writing, or deep plot. But then the groupthink decided that Cline was history’s greatest monster because of some skeevy stuff he written prior online, and suddenly it was ‘Cishet white male fantasy’ the novel and the worst book of all time. Since no one wants to contradict the cool kids we can’t acknowledge that any fun was ever had reading it ,at any point.
I feel like it has a lot to do with the times. A lot of “nerd” stuff was still kinda niche when RPO came out, but that’s no longer so. People play more and more video games on all sorts of platforms nowadays, Star Wars is back, there are reboots or sequels of practically every slightly popular 80s or 90s property either out or in the works, and it took a global pandemic to stop a superhero movie from releasing in theaters (children know who Rocket Raccoon is, and if you told me that in 2010 I would have laughed in your face).
I mean, I’m not saying we were innocent children a brief decade ago, but back then, it was easier to feel a little self-satisfied for being “in the know” about some of the references RPO was making. In 2020, everybody is in the know and since everybody is in the know, a lot of that charm has worn off. Add in the general passage of time and how jaded heavy users of the internet can be, and it’s no surprise that a sequel to RPO has not been received well. We are drowning in nostalgia, so catering to it is no longer as easy as it used to be.
“One reviewer on this site liked a book 10 years ago, but a different reviewer on this site didn’t like a similar book today” isn’t the weirdest tangent that’s come up on this message board, but that’s only because it’s a really weird message board.
It’s weird, because it wasn’t all that long ago in the grand scheme of things. But RPO came out in the sort of sweet spot for “nerds” as a catch-all term: comic book movies were cresting again, the Big Bang Theory was a populist hit, etc. It was a brief period between the traditional mainstream denigration of nerds as pathetic hapless losers who should be mocked and their new cultural designation as toxic predatory gatekeepers who should be mocked.
There is indeed a great story waiting to be told about this transition and what caused it, hopefully not by anyone who leans too hard on muh Gamergate (a symptom & accelerant of the process, not its cause) and so forth as the cause. The culture took a diverse group of people who had traditionally been “punched down” at and came up with excuses for why they should be “punched up” at, and somehow failed to notice anything strange about that.
I think it might be partially down to how popular 80s nostalgia was for a while last decade, so the Ready Player One books feel less relevant and more played out now that the trend is over.
I’ve been beating the drum of the original’s terribleness since it came out. I’m glad to see threads about it are no longer filled with adulation.
“The core problem—that the novel’s vision of geekdom focuses entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men—is more difficult to address.”Why is this a problem? Cishet white men may be only one sliver of humanity, but it’s a big sliver; why wouldn’t they have books?
That’s not remotely what the review was implying, you knee-jerk reactionary twit.
If you have to resort to insults on your first response, you’ve lost the argument
Ok, then still that’s not what the review is implying. Just that maybe instead of doing the bare minimum, these books could be more than barebones enjoyment based of wish fulfillment and name-dropping. I read the book when it first came out and liked it, but since I read that when I was literally in middle school, I’ve grown more critical of it, the same way I think many have with most of nerd culture.
I don’t think RP1 is a great book by any means , but nor is it Everything Wrong with Our Society blah blah blah. It’s a young adult novel, for God’s sake, and people act like it’s Mein Kampf
If you have to resort to insults on your first response, you’ve lost the argument When a descriptive term is indistinguishable from an insult, the argument comes pre-lost.
Nah, that’s not how arguments work.
Perhaps not, but to misquote not-actually-Gandhi, I believe in being the change I want to see in the world 🙂
I’m not sure how you read that quote from the review and don’t interpret it to mean that the main issue with Ready Player One was that the interests represented were those of straight white guys. If the review meant to say “The core issue with the book is that it focuses on the favorite media of cishet white men and neglecting every other aspect of writing such as interesting characters, sparkling dialogue, thought-out worldbuilding, an involving plot or flowing prose” then that sentence certainly failed for me.The problem with RP1 wasn’t that it’s appeal was in who would like the references, the problem was that there wasn’t much appeal besides references.
And they do have books.
But, books that want to accomplish ‘world-building’ need to be a little more expansive, by definition.
And books that want to encompass the “world of geekdom” should be aware of the extent to which geekdom is a marginal space and most of those subcultures have substantial overlap with non-cis, non-het, not-white groups.
And I mean, come on, this is a sequelYou can’t branch out in the sequel?
“But, books that want to accomplish ‘world-building’ need to be a little more expansive, by definition.”Why? Why can’t he serve this one particular audience by giving them what they like? Is any other demographic group off-limits to pandering? “geekdom is a marginal space and most of those subcultures have substantial overlap with non-cis, non-het, not-white groups.”This stuff is the most popular stuff in culture. It is more popular than football, baseball, and basketball. It’s not the exclusive domain of any group. And if it was dominated by those groups, wouldn’t a book centering people not in those groups be empowering to those people?
Why? Why can’t he serve this one particular audience by giving them what they like? Is any other demographic group off-limits to pandering?I repeat: it’s fine to write books for this audience, this audience does have books (some good) that pander to them. My point is that it’s a bad fit for the genre. Cline wants to tell a story about the whole world—literally all of society—moved into a virtual space, so now it’s his job to write a story that encompasses that.
Like, Han Solo is pretty cool character, people like him, why doesn’t Star Wars just make all of its characters into Han Solo? Obi-Wan, not a reserved mystic who knows more than he lets on, now he’s a talkative, brash, cocksure, pilot. C-3P0? Nah, people don’t like worriers and statisticians, people like Han Solo. Give ‘em what they want, Threepio is a Han Solo now. R2-D2: Han Solo; Chewbacca? Han Solo’s partner, Han Solo, a match made in heaven. Leia? She’s a Han Solo, too. Vader, Luke, Jabba, Greedo, Porkins, Mon Calamari: make everyone a Han Solo!
It’s not that narrowly written stories are off-limits. It’s that some genres of story are better stories when they’re not written narrowly.
‘Cline wants to tell a story about the whole world—literally all of society—moved into a virtual space, so now it’s his job to write a story that encompasses that.’In fairness, if the past few years have taught us everything it’s that moving everything into a virtual space tends to narrow perspectives rather than expand them.
“My fandom is bigger than all sports!” A) citation needed B) then you have plenty of stuff to read, quit your whinging.
I don’t read this crap. I just don’t see why it’s a “problem.”
That cishet white males immediately assume that one less book for them means no books is the problem with such a narrow view, it creates coddled babies who whine when literally everything isn’t about them.
I don’t care about this book. I just don’t see why it’s a “problem” for a book to focus “entirely on the favorite media of cishet white men.” And if it’s a problem for this book, isn’t it a problem for similar books as well? So if the “problem” were fixed it wouldn’t be just “one less book.”
It’s a problem specifically because there’s already such an absurd amount of media built for cishet white men that it’s overflowing, it’s the easy mode. Because non-cishet-white-males are used to having their projects cancelled because they aren’t cishet white male enough. White males get coddled by the industry until they whing when literally everything isn’t about them.Until white males have, say, had a successful toyline cancelled because you weren’t the right demographic and they would rather lose money than sell to you, they won’t ever understand what living in a world biased against their nostalgia is like.
“they won’t ever understand what living in a world biased against their nostalgia is like”This movie review states that it’s a “problem” that the movie is about their nostalgia. So they probably could understand.
Nah, suggesting a single review is anywhere the same is so absurd to be silly. Lol good joke, acting like white men are so so fragile that a single review cuts as deep as industry vets cancelling lines because white men bought them, going out of their way to cut content for white men.
what movie review
What you’re saying is true but… wouldn’t there also be a good chance that media will continue to have this bias when it comes in the form of VR simulations in 2045 made by evil corporations as an escape from a dystopian post-apocalyptic existence? That the OASIS would reflect the world-view of its white cishet nerd creator?
If the book critiqued that as an utterly sad future, that could be a really fascinating book! Ready Player One does the exact opposite, trying to convince the reader how amazingly fun, interesting, and fulfilling such a world will be. “Don’t worry guys, every single thing in the future is actually based on what white, straight males liked to do in the leisure time in the 80s and 90s. It’s the best!”
Assume the person writing the critique DOES care, and you’ll see why you should listen to them instead of yourself.
since when?
i pretty much stopped caring what she had to say after that. not that ready player one was any good to begin with.
Using the phrase “cishit white men” unironically…l to the ol.
In 2012, I had a co-worker who basically knew how to talk about three things: Sailor Moon, her newborn daughter (who was named after a character from Sailor Moon), and fucking Ready Player One. Ooh, boy, she is going to be into this.
There’s a phrase from the first issue of N+1 (how’s that for a random citation) that I think was criticizing the The Believer and it’s ilk, about presenting feelings instead of thoughts: Context without content. It strikes me as a useful description of something that fandom in general often turn into, where references replace storytelling purpose.So I’ve never managed to read enough of Cline work to finish one of his books—I didn’t like the writing in general—the obvious reach of it pop culturally and the fact I’m a “nerd” enough to have it constantly suggested to me for a few years has made it inescapable, so I’ve got to ask: does it seem like he likes any of this stuff beyond it’s awesome or something? It always reads like someone who’s gone to the 1oo best restaurants in the world but doesn’t really like food.I’m getting it secondhand from the review, but that’s not what I’d describe the plot of Strange Days as at all, at least as a takeaway. (The new tech is a riff on an old genre of movies, for one. Cool, underrated movie—any references to Near Dark too?) but is there any essay or a passage, where Cline displays thoughtfulness about what he consumed?I don’t know. I have a hard time grappling with the idea of spending that much time watching good (and bad) work and writing (a hard thing too) and never feeling like someone else. As though there’s only sympathy an no empathy in all interactions. That and the whole writing thing. It’s still not good.
does it seem like he likes any of this stuff beyond it’s awesome or something?Not once. Not ever, not for a single instant. The main character “loves the 80s” because he stands to financially benefit if he loves it the most. He never explains why he or anybody else might like it, he never even highlights any particular moments of any movie or whatever that he thinks are especially cool. He’s just a funko pop collector.
That final line would have even more bite if you specified he was the kind to keep them in their boxes.
I have a handful of real regrets in life, some of them serious, some of them petty. But none of them, not a single one, stings as much as passing up the chance to buy Funco Pops of Scott Pilgrim, Knives Chau, and Ramona Flowers for $15 each about a month before they were discontinued. I didn’t want to collect them, they just would have been really fun to have in my office. Now they’re like $100 each.
I am enjoying Mike and Conor tackling this book on 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, the podcast that introduced ne to the term “Clinean”. I didn’t think they’d do the sequel, but at least they’re not doing the Bob Honey sequel.
Oh, I just Googled this and now I know what I’ll be listening to for the next week.
I listened to a couple episodes the first time around and… it was just depressing to be so immersed in a world of such shitty writing. Maybe I’m just not the hate-watch/read type, but I just did not enjoy dedicating that much time to such pure dreck. If it were covered in 4 episodes it might scratch an itch to rubberneck at some of the worst sentences, but there’s something like 75+ hours of that podcast dedicated just to RP1, it’s too much of an investment (ironic, given the podcast name) to spend that much time thinking about this book.
They get through it in about 8 episodes, then they move on. Talking about RP1 for four years and 80+ episodes would be…dedicated. Kind of like those guys who watched Grown Ups 2 every Monday for a year.
To be fair, I think it’s just the first eight episodes (I started listening last night), but that’s still roughly 9 to 10 hours discussing godawful writing.But that’s an interesting point you bring up; “so bad it’s good” isn’t really a category for literature. I suppose if anyone is going to attempt a podcast about badly written books, it makes sense it would be Mike Nelson (I guess Paul Sheer, too). It just takes so much more time, effort, and mental energy to actively read a shitty novel than the passively sit through a shitty movie. And badly written is different from fun and trashy. A trashy romance novel still needs to be competently written, include some suspense, and demonstrate an interest in the characters, otherwise it’s just boring and painful.
Nothing against Cline but he is a sort of bad author and none of his books actually try to offer more than a basic plot and the characters are a bit thin.
If he had actually leaned into the realism of the second act in Wades year and a half….maybe two year long IOI run? I mean really owned it? Stuff the story with as much competent “I’m an adult now” detail in the real world as there was “childish” nerdgasm in act one?Anyway RPO 2 meh never planned on reading it Cline has proven he writes “Let’s play” novels of players playing the game inept warts and all….rather than writing the novelization of the actual game play.
I will admit to enjoying the first book because of the whole “Hey that is stuff I like” aspect of it but it has not aged well at all. No idea why Ernie felt a sequel was needed when he already wrote the exact same book again with Armada
Money, probably.
“Hmm, I haven’t contributed much to my 401k recently”
This shit right here is why I don’t like nerds. Well, one reason of many. Many.
I don’t understand the backlash against the first book (& movie) or the attention paid to this second one. “Ready Player One” was unique at the time and a fun beach read, but I barely remember it and have little interest in the movie or this sequel.Why isn’t everyone else shrugging?
Because one something becomes popular, maybe more popular than it deserved, there must be a backlash of people who knew better than the rest of us sheep all along. Internet mob karma.
I’m with you. I didn’t read it, didn’t see the movie. All I know about it is from AV Club. I’m not sure if I ever will read it, but I might in an airport some time. Otherwise,
This book is kind of right square in the center of the preoccupations of the AV Club readership. Probably a significant percentage thinks “I could have written that (why didn’t I?) and it would have been better.” (Not trying to be superior to this mindset, just that the bestseller I definitely haven’t written would be in a different genre.)
Because your viewpoint isn’t the only one, you absolute waste of oxygen
Why isn’t everyone else shrugging?.Because after the first one came out, it became super “kewl” to hate Ernest Cline’s completely medicore writing and now since digging up that one comment from him about porn from who-knows-when, he has also been labeled a sexist piece of garbage. So people get even more superiority points by roasting him. It’s a win-win, in some superiority circles.
Just going, “Eh, not a super-well-written book, but he was clearly trying to address the issues from his first novel,” is not gonna cut it.
I’m 18% in and nothing has happened but some lame world-building. There has been zero dialogue except between Wade and his robots. It’s terribly boring and Cline clearly just wants to recap how much he knows about pop culture. Luckily, even if you don’t get the reference, he explains it in the next phrase.
I liked the story in the first one, but Wade was a creep.
It’s shocking that this guy and Harry Knowles are friends.
“My work here is done” – Ernest Cline *dabs out*
I think Cline needs to write something beyond making sci fi novels of 80’s nostalgia to keep off the criticism he is a one hit wonder. I agree with others on here that there is nothing wrong with an author writing what he knows. But after the terrible “Armada”, that I quit after about fifty pages, maybe he should have taken a break instead of doing a sequel so fast. Wasn’t “Armada” already pretty much a spiritual sequel to RPO? (the whole thing was basically, “hey kids, did you like Ready Player One? Then you would like it with 1980’s video game references instead!”.Ready Player One to me was what I call a great “airplane read”, like “Gone Girl” or Dan Brown novels in that it is a page turner that you like while passing the time on a plane or an airport waiting out a layover that really cannot stand up to being called a “great book”. Also, critics (maybe wrongfully) thought the book at the time was a subtle dig at nerd culture as the future of the world hinged on one nerd’s list of what he thought was cool. Unfortunately, Spielberg’s movie played it completely straight with the premise and never acknowledged that kids in 2048 having to obsess over pop culture from seventy years before was just ridiculously silly.To me that was the big criticism of this material after the fact, was that it WAS glorifying nerd culture, not satirizing it. If the guy who made OASIS really did not want anyone to “solve” his quest (because it was HIS) and therefore put in what he thought were impossible references to hinder anyone from really solving it, that to me would have been much more biting, rather than trying to find the “right person” like some willy wonka.
kids in 2048 having to obsess over pop culture from seventy years before was just ridiculously silly.Not really arguing with you but:
There’s nothing wrong with revisting and rediscovering genuinely good pop culture from previous decades, like big band music, for example. Large portions of 1980s culture that people now obsess over, though, were throw-away garbage. Just because we remember something doesn’t make that thing good.
Generally speaking, I agree with you and I’m not defending this book or fetishizing 80s culture. But even garbage takes on a nostalgic or novelty (ironic! but novel against the backdrop of current culture is what I mean) veneer that can make it seem better than it was which is fine. There are plenty of examples of this from 50s and 60s music. Maybe it just mostly happens with music though and not the rest of pop culture. The Archies or the Communards and not duck’s ass haircuts or parachute pants.
haha. True. There is always something from every decade that is cool. But there is a difference between ironically going to a big band set or dressing a little retro and the fate of the world being determined by who was in Benny Goodman’s orchestra or knowing the cast of Disney’s Davey Crockett
I will never pass up an opportunity to post this:
I feel bad for authors when everyone starts ganking on them. Except for the Twilight author.
The book was an enjoyable read and was hugely popular at the time. I don’t think anyone was confusing it with literature and Cline as a competent writes, but it was fun. I liked all the references to things from my childhood. The only aspect I didn’t enjoy was the need to explain said references. It’s like a movie/TV Show having big red arrows and subtitiles on screen pointing to easter eggs. ‘Hey, look down there, in the corner, it’s the car from Knight Rider, did you see it, how cool is that. Remember Knight Rider, you do right, okay okay, keep enjoying the movie.’
I went ahead and found the AV Club review for Ready Player One, which had been written by Kevin MacFarland: https://aux.avclub.com/ernest-cline-ready-player-one-1798169354What’s useful is comments from 2011 are still below the review. I find it interesting how even back then, the book was criticized for being heavy on pop culture indexing and low on character development and plot.
Maybe Ready Player One was just Eat Pray Love for Gen X white guys?
I find it interesting that RP1 came out less than a year after Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, an analysis (and warning) about how pop culture nostalgia was hindering creativity. Ten years later it’s clear that Reynolds lost the debate but was a prophet
Is there a bonus schedule based on how woke and article is on this website? If not it sure seems like it.
ernest cline is dan brown for gen X and should be treated as such. terrible prose, stupid plots, poorly written, but very readable for a specific age group. silly, but nothing wrong with that
So basically this is Jenny Nicholson’s “Ready Player One for Girls” video, but played straight and with a dude as the main character.It’s like a woman once told Cline after a bad breakup that he doesn’t get what women like and he never quite understood what she meant.
Hm. Makes me think that the problem with RP1 or RP2 (read the first book, watched the Spielberg adaptation, don’t want to read the second book) is, among other things, putting nostalgia as the main value metric of older items of pop culture. The commodified geekery. Another is that Ernest Cline is unable to make any kind of dystopia because he does not understand the world at all, but hey, this happened as well with most of the scifi writers as Neal Stephenson. I think of that when I read “no scifi writer would have expected the things in 2020 and Trump”. Well, some did, like Atwood, just because they were interested on what happened outside their very neighbourhood. Rant off.
I try to not be as immediately negative and cynical towards other people’s tastes as I have been in the past, but RP1 is something that worms itself under my skin and gets my bile up. I’ll be blunt: my opinion of anybody is immediately lessened it they admit that they like this book. Is that fair? No, probably not, but there it is. I simply do not understand how anybody can enjoy it. There are plenty of comments here and elsewhere like “oh, i grew up in the 80s, so it’s a book for my generation” and it’s just incomprehensible. For one thing, it’s not as though 95 percent of the references are anything other than extremely mainstream stuff that everybody knows (wow, you did a Knight Rider/Ghostbusters/Back to the Future hybrid car? listen to my panties flood), and for the 5 percent that are slightly more obscure, he explains exactly what all of the references are from anyway. You don’t even get the satisfaction of recognizing something hidden!There’s also a lot of comments like “well, it’s not trying to be [insert classic literature here], what’s wrong with turning your brain off every now and again?” and I would invite anybody saying this to turn their brain off permanently with a very efficient handheld lead distribution system, if that’s what you want. There’s nothing wrong with cheap fun and escapism, but if your idea of that is a string of references recited with nothing — absolutely nothing — to transform them into something even remotely original, then you are creatively deceased. Scott Pilgrim does the references thing too but also uses them to tell a story with a modicum of creativity (ironically, about how a person who sees things through the lens of pop culture references can be toxic as hell). You can have escapism and fun beach reads without having to settle for the worst writing on earth.
Ready Player Two is filled with ridiculous fantasies, like Wade owning the rights to Back To The Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai and using them to create cross-over films as a passion projectEven leaving aside the whole series’ fixation on empty references, that “passion project” sounds like it would just be insufferable. Beyond “1980s!”, none of those things have anything in common that would suggest a way to link them together in order to create a halfway interesting crossover, even if we judge it by the very generous terms of pure fanfiction. That’s the very semblance of “hey, here’s four things that nerds who like the 1980s would recognise!” pandering. In fact, give me control of all of 1980s popular culture and a VR universe to smush them together in, I can do better right now, off the top of my head. 1980s horror-comedies? The Ghostbusters and the Monster Squad team up to battle Beetlejuice, who has allied himself with Gremlins. 1980s sci-fi time travel? Marty McFly, Bill and Ted and the 1980s versions of Doctor Who have to save the space-time continuum from accidentally being destroyed by the Time Bandits. 1980s TV action/mystery? Michael Knight and KITT have to join forces with The A-Team to bring down a drug lord, only Tubbs and Crockett are on their trail. Easy.Bad enough that Ernest Cline’s engaged in utter fanwank, but he can’t even come up with halfway creative fanwank.
That sounds like the kind of stuff a person who’s never seen Halo/D&D crossover fanfics would say.
…Beyond “1980s!”, none of those things have anything in common that would suggest a way to link them together in order to create a halfway interesting crossover, even if we judge it by the very generous terms of pure fanfiction….The cars.It’s a dumb setup for a joke about him creating a super-car, combining the vehicles from all those properties.
As someone who was a kid in the 80s, I really don’t understand the near-fetish devotion to the pop culture of that decade. It was, on the whole… merely OK. Large portions of it were cheaply and cynically produced to sell toys and other merchandise. There were some stand-outs, but over all, but overall, it was saturated with a particularly high quotient of throw-away entertainment.
“which Cline acknowledges in the text is a fusion of the plots of The Matrix and Strange Days.”Which isn’t even a good ‘80s reference. Jesus this guy is inept.
I mean, to be fair to Cline, *he* never said all his references have to be 80s-based. All his reviewers did.
I’m not anticipating this book will be good, but the part of the review about Wade learning to understand that it is okay to be sexually attracted to a trans woman is instructive. Apparently there isn’t character growth or learning anymore, people have to be 100% perfect from the first page.
I would say the biggest problem to solve is that the first novel is entirely forgettable. Even reading through your article, I don’t recall a single thing about it. I remember thinking it was fine when I was reading through it, but really, I remember more about books I read two decades ago than I do about this one, and I read it only a few years back.
REFERENCES THE BOOK! 2.
“Don’t you kids ever get tired of picking through the wreckage of a past generation’s nostalgia?” Ready Player One’s primary villain, Nolan Sorrento, asks this of the protagonists of Ready Player Two,
Ernest Cline’s sequel to his 2011 debut novel. “The entire OASIS is
like one giant graveyard, haunted by the undead pop-culture icons of a
bygone era. A crazy old man’s shrine to a bunch of pointless crap.”
…and this is supposed to be the villain?
The *bad guy* in this novel is anti-nostalgia? Well there’s your problem right there.
I am a straight white cis lady of the 80s, and I loved Ready Player One. All that stuff in there was stuff I Loved back in the day, and while John Hughes movies were also my jam, the continued idea that us girls didn’t like the same things as the boys is in and of itself a sexist bit of narrative.That being said, I had no idea there was another book, and TBH, I have zero interest in it, maybe because the movie squashed my interest in the any more of this story? IDK, but it feels very unnecessary.
I sometimes feel like I’m the only one who thought the first book was pretty terrible even at the time it came out. The writing was amateurish, the main character was thoroughly unlikeable—all it had going for it was “Hey! I remember that too!”
but that reliving the memories of having sex in other people’s bodies or
enjoying it risk-free in the OASIS has made him a lot more open-minded.
As someone who isn’t a trans man or woman, I’m not going to pretend that I completely understand the feeling of being assigned a gender at birth that doesn’t align with what I know to be true about myself.
That said, when he talks about Wade having sex “in other people’s bodies….” that doesn’t seem to be the same thing. It comes off like comparing someone who’s trans to someone who likes to role play.
In the OASIS, much like my bedroom, I can safely role-play whatever fantasy I want…but at the end of the day once the fantasy is over I step out of the bedroom and go back out in to the world as myself.
Trans men and women aren’t just some sexual fantasy, though. To boil it all down to “Oh I get it now because I tried VR penetration and it was kinda fun…” is a really gross oversimplification. Like, I can’t imagine Cline would even think of saying that to a gay man, so why does he do it here?
I couldn’t imagine bothering to read a hack writers SECOND book… that’s a sequel no less!
Genuinely surprised he even tried to address the criticisms; less surprised that he didn’t do a good job addressing them.
Ehhh…It wasn’t ever going to satisfy most of you anyway.
“That’s nice for him, but the idea that it would take a person 28 years and immersive VR technology to make them see trans women as women”….I’m assuming that in this situation the correct response from the character is ..” I was wrong and have learned something and changed , but alas as a cishet white male its already too late for me , and I must kill myself ( by seppuku using LionO’s sword of omens of course) .”
The same issue is present in Cline’s efforts to acknowledge the effects
that the OASIS technology would have on gender, race, and sexuality,
which he hinted at in Ready Player One through Aech, a Black
lesbian who portrays herself as a straight white man in the virtual
space to enjoy the privilege that comes with it.
This is actually the most poorly aged portion of the novel, and rather hilariously so.
Would I get the same effect of reading the book if I listen to Huey Lewis & The News while watching The Lost Boys also eating a ton of Nerds candy and spinning around my apartment until I vomit?
Cline knows pop culture, but apparently zip about sports. He refers to the ball cap Magnum PI wore as being from the Detroit Lions baseball team.
The only bit I remember in RPO is the bit where he’s in the apartment and he wishes he could paint over the mirror so that he wouldn’t have to look at himself in the brief time he’s not plugged in. Damn, that’s some self-loathing. I like Back To The Future, and my friend digs it too, but we accept for what it is.
>by having characters share the source of a quote while also making it clear that it’s shameful to not already know this.
newfound fortune to make the world a better place. This doesn’t really
work, but Cline never gives any satisfying reason why.< I don’t think the book ever gave the impression that her efforts “didn’t work”, quite to the contrary, actually. Just that it was a huge task that not even a few billionaires could solve quickly or alone. She was making a difference, it was just a Sisyphean task.
>the idea that it would take a person 28 years and immersive VR
technology to make them see trans women as women is disappointing.