OASIS returns

 I finally got a copy of Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline from the library.

Let's start with the elephant in the room. The original, while enjoyable to me, got caught in the emerging #MeToo novement as well as the horrors of toxic gamers, gatekeeping, and the generally much needed exposure of how poorly minorities are treated within what's supposed to be a much more open community of nerds and geeks. (I'll also state my opinion that the book was less bad about this than the movie, wherein the strong female characters do wind up getting saved by the underdog with much more frequency. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie once I got my head around the very major plot changes and just enjoyed what they were able to do with licensing deals, but Spielberg did turn it much more into male power fantasy than the book really was.) 

I got the impression that this, the sequel was written to better illuminate those issues in ways to help people who are still fans of the original see better where the issues are. Whether or not it succeeds with this remains to be seen, although it did show me a few things I hadn't noticed previously. 

Anyway, as we open, Aech, Shoto, Art3mis, and Parzvial are currently still the board of GSS, having absorbed the last book's antagonist company and sending the main villain to jail awaiting execution. However, Wade, aka Parzival. has broken up with Samantha, aka Art3mis, due to his own toxic behaviors. Much of the friction comes from the fact that 3 of them are building a ship to fly humans and their OASIS avatars to Alpha Centauri rather than try to fix the Earth. When ONI comes around, the fractures deepen. ONI is a new OASIS interface, wherein one literally uploads one's brain into the Oasis for up to 12 hours for the ultimate experience. Samantha is against it, but the other 3 live for it. Not long after ONI is released to the public (James Halliday, the originator of GSS, created it, but never released it, leaving the decision up to his heir), a new Scoreboard and riddle show up, and despite everyone telling him not to, Wade starts the search. He doesn't get far for quite some time until a new breed of gunter shows him how to get the first shard of the Siren's Soul. For which Wade pays her 1 Billion dollars and helps her and her crew to relocate to Columbus. 

Then, suddenly, Wade's mentor and one of the co-creators of the Oasis gets on the board, finding two of the shards. And then the plot actually takes off, as Og vanishes off the grid and Wade's robes of office are stolen by the first true AI in the Oasis, everyone using ONI is unable to log out, and Wade is given roughly 12 hours to find the other 6 shards are return them to Anorak, the OASIS version of James Halliday, who evidently gained sentience during a brief period of free will at the end of the first book. 

What follows is a peek into the life of Og's wife, Kira, who dies before the first book started, but who's memories are relived by Wade every time he collects a shard. As all the shards are on worlds Kira helped create... Along the way, we get illustrations of valid issues within geek and nerd worlds as people point out to Wade their problems with various planets. For instance, one of the shards involves a planet based on John Hughes' movies, at which point we get shown exactly why so many people HATE both male leads in Pretty in Pink. Indeed, Art3mis beheads Ducky, which frankly, was a highlight, given how much I hate that character. As we wind up on Afterlife, a planet devoted to Prince, Aech discusses the pain involved in some of the Artist's statements after converting to Jehovah's Witness, as prior to that, he was a role model for queer and non gender conforming folks. On the other hand, the battle with the Seven incarnations of Prince makes Simon Green proud, what with Morris Day and the Time joining forces with Janet Jackson and her Rhythm Nation to take on the NPG and the Revolution. It also takes Shoto out of the game sue to his unfortunate but hysterical musical pun that is considered blasphemy in the realm. 

We even get a different perspective on Tolkien (which frankly, I've watched both the Bakashi and Jackson versions, but never made it through the books), as we discuss the fact that everyone but the orcs in the world are lily white, but the monstrous orcs are of black skin. In the end, Wade must contend with how flawed and downright horrible his idol, Halliday was in life. 

And truthfully, this is a discussion we'll likely be having for quite some time, as we reexamine the lives of people we admire and see some of their actions as less than heroic, as we reevaluate our relationship with art as we find out unsavory aspects of the artist. (A recent case would be Rowling's transphobia, wherein we all were forced to examine how much we LOVED the Wizarding World and how those ideas were places we could fit in, verses the sad reality that the original creator can't recognize that the very same people who identified with her world are valid in their identities. Or our relationships with historical figures, like the Founding Fathers who owned slaves while writing documents filled with egalitarian ideology, or colonization leading to genocide.) 

While I did enjoy this, as Wade examines his own prejudices and shortcomings, I honestly wonder if we would have gotten a different story had not his previous two books gotten thrown in with other issues. So, yes, worth reading, and again, keep Youtube open while reading, since it's the only way to get rid of the earworms that come with pop culture nostalgia.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades

While I've read Ernest Klein's Ready Player One on a previous occasion, I recently found a copy at one of the books sales I've been hitting this past year. Since I'm between holds at the library (most of my reserve list is either not published as of yet or I was late getting a reserve in so I have a bit of a wait), I figured I'd pass some time by re-reading it. I just wasn't expecting to finish it again in two days.

For those of you who haven't read it....

Ready Player One concerns one Wade Watts in the year 2044, as humanity is in decline from a lack of natural resources. When we meet Wade (AKA Parzival), both of his parents are dead and he's living in a stack cluster in Oklahoma City with his drug addled aunt. He's enrolled in an on-line High School in the OASIS, a free-ish online world that most of the Earth is in. (basically, with a set of gloves and a visor that scan the world on to your retinas, it's virtual reality on a universal scale.) And he's a gunter, one of the many seeking the OASIS creator Halliday's Easter Egg, which gives the first one to find it ownership of OASIS and all of his sizable fortune.

Wade's best friend online is Aich, who competes in tournaments for money and thus is more well off than Wade. (Seems virtual currency is worth more than "real" currency.) Later on, they add Art3mis to their cabal, a female gunter and blogger.

Halliday's will left everyone with a riddle to find the first key, which in turn would lead to the first Gate. While in Latin Class, Wade solves the riddle and uses a school provided transport chit to travel across the virtual world to get to a small forest that opens on to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Having access to the module, he's able to get into the throne room, where the Lich (who's supposed to be elsewhere) greets him and challenges him to a game of the 80's classic "Joust". (The one where you press the flap button a lot and try to make the NPCs drop eggs.) Art3mis, who had solved the riddle a month prior but had yet to beat the Lich meets him and points out that his name now tops the scoreboard, which had been blank prior to someone getting the first key. Wade figures out where the first gate is and ends up playing through challenge wherein he's Matthew Broderick in Wargames.

While this does lead to plenty of money and endorsement deals, it also puts a giant target on his back courtesy of IOI and the Sixers. IOI being a company that wants to control OASIS (so they can charge people to use it and make ad revenue off of it) and the Sixers being a group within IOI named Oologists who work for the company trying to find the Egg. The leaders of the Sixers, Sorrento, approaches Wade about becoming a Sixer. When Wade denies him, Sorrento and IOI set off a bomb in Wade's stack. Thankfully, Wade's in his hiding space, buried in a pile of cars.

And on and on it goes, filled to the brim with 80's cultural references, until the very last climactic battle in front of the third gate that features Ultraman taking on MechaGodzilla. And a race to the finish in the gate as Sorrento runs about 18 minutes behind Wade.

Given how quickly I finished it this time, I'll again say it's a very engaging read, filled with memories of my childhood, even if a few of the references got on my nerve. (Like the Second Gate, which involves RUSH's "Temple of Syrinax".) I also found myself laughing when a discussion about The Goonies revealed where I knew the mother on The Real O'Neals from.

If you haven't read it, and, like me, remember the 80's, pick up a copy. Or if you like Audiobooks, the version of this one is read by none other than Wil Wheaton.

No gung ho lizards, but yeah...

Evidently not long before I started this blog, Ernest Klien released an absolutely fabulous book filled to the brim with geekery and a neat message or five named Ready Player One. I won't go into it here, but yeah, if you haven't read it, go do so now.

Anyway, he recently released a second novel, not set in the same universe, but with similar themes of geek saving the day. Armada starts with our narrator, Zach Lightman introducing his life as a Senior in High School in the Pacific Northwest. He has a reputation as a bit crazy, his father died not long after he was born, he works part time at a computer gaming shop, and he, like most of the world, is playing one of two MMO games by the same company. Zach is more involved with Armada, which is the space combat against the Europans, while most of his friends prefer Terra Firma, which involves the Europan invasion of Earth on the ground. It bears mentioning that Zach is number 6 on the pilot leader board.

Things get shaken up first by Zach seeing a real Glaive fighter flying around his hometown, which makes him doubt his sanity. He re examines some of his dead father's conspiracy theory filled notebooks. Then a real life ship from Armada lands on his school's lawn, his boss walks out and recruits him for the real life Earth Defense Agency that had supposedly only existed in the twin MMOs.

We come to find out that the Europan invasion is real, they're invading, and all the people who've been playing the MMOs have been being trained to pilot the real drones into combat both in space and on Earth when the first wave of the Armada arrives. We find out that we discovered the existence of life on Europa when Voyager 1 dropped by and found a giant icy swastika on the southern hemisphere. We sent greetings, and in return got warning that we had committed a hostile act, and that they were prepared to destroy humanity.

Mind you, the occasional invasion attempt has left humanity time to reverse engineer our own technology to better combat the Europan invaders.

If elements of this plot line sound really familiar, it's supposed to be. Seems that most science fiction has been designed to prepare the world for the oncoming invasion.

And what fun it is. The characters get mostly fleshed out enough that we care about their fates, we feel for Zach and his daddy issues. We even get to deal with one of the dumber tropes that plague genre fiction, wherein the noble gay folk sacrifice themselves to save the heterosexuals who can stop the whatever the big bad winds up being.

It's a really fun book. It reminded me quite a bit of the movie Scream, even if no one tried to fit a massive chest out a dog door. But the idea of characters knowing they're trapped in a trope and then trying to figure out ways to work within that trope or break out of it entirely

Well worth reading, even with it's few brief RUSH references.