Ready Player 2

Well, it's out.

"Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday's contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything.

Hidden within Halliday's vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS a thousand times more wondrous—and addictive—than even Wade dreamed possible.

With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest—a last Easter Egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious prize.

And an unexpected, impossibly powerful, and dangerous new rival awaits, one who'll kill millions to get what he wants."

Thoughts?

I just finished the book. I do find it a good follow-up to RP1. But that's just me. I'm honestly still processing things.

Edited by CB2001 on Dec 3rd 2020 at 2:46:43 PM

I read 5 pages then put it down, it was clear to me I wouldn't enjoy it. I loved the first book when it came out, I even have a signed copy, but now that its been a few years and I've matured some I just can't stand the nonstop mental masturbation and fetishization of the 80's. It was a great trick 8 years ago, but now its annoying.

I don't understand the popularity of this series. I've been reading reviews of the two books, and a lot of them lambast the second for what sounds like the same reasons they loved the first one, and will say they still love the first one.

There are a few holes. The instant Parzival puts on the new headset OASIS goes into "better than life" mode. This means that the whole network was already running everything necessary for him to do things like eat an apple completely realistically, without anyone having realized that everything in OASIS already had complete smell and taste simulation and without anyone having tested it before. So how did the system chose how, say, an alien fruit should taste and smell without the people who designed the fruit having any idea that the system was ready to emulate tasete and smell? Did no one ever wonder what all the memory space used to store a taste and smell that nobody was using was?

Parzival is very easily forgiven for all of his truly bad mistakes in the opening chapters of the book. Once he and Art3mis are pursuing '80s trivia again the fact that he maybe doomed 500 million people and has no interest in trying to save the Earth apparently becomes trivial to Art3mis.

And John Hughes movies are fun and all, but I'm not a fan of all of them, and I don't much care for Prince, so those quests weren't of much interest to me.

The transhuman elements have the problem all transhuman works have: There is no continuation of you. The original you still ages and dies while your digital copy continues. In other words, it's not immortality for you, just for a copy that thinks it's you.

Edited by Bense on Oct 6th 2021 at 8:11:25 AM

Haven't read the second book yet but to me, the appeal was that it was the only thing I'd ever seen at the time where being a geek was portrayed as something worthwhile and empowering, instead of just a joke for people to laugh at.

Plus whatever else you could say about the book, the author loved subcultures and that shone through.

I was kinda disappointed by Ready Player 2. It felt too much like an '80's era movie sequel—the same plot and structure as the first installment all over again. I also felt like they went a little far in demonizing Halliday.

I actually feel like the movie was better than the original novel; it was co-written by Ernest Cline, and they kind of fixed or at least improved upon a lot of the character and story issues that the novel had.

Edited by Robbery on Oct 8th 2021 at 9:35:31 AM

Eh, yes and no. The clone is you and will carry on you. Your outta luck, though.

The clone is not really you. It begins as a copy of you that has your memories, but it never actually did any of the things you remember doing. It would be silly to try to hold it responsible for any of the mistakes you made, for instance. There is no real continuation of your consciousness. Your clone won't remember anything that happened after the copy was made, it won't remember your death, and if you have an immortal soul your clone won't be a continuation of this soul.

This is not a continuation of you, it is the beginning of a new (in this case purely virtual) being that happens to have your memories, but immediately diverges from you, the original.

Edited by Bense on Oct 18th 2021 at 9:48:32 AM

I still can't process the absolute Fridge Horror that would entail from being a digital copy of a heavily pregnant woman.

Like... that's an actual frigging nightmare.