Ernest Cline’s debut book “Ready Player One” was catnip for anyone who came of age during the 1980’s.  It was set in a bleak future where most people spent their days in a virtual world called the OASIS.  Before passing away, one of the founders created a quest where the first person to solve it would take over the OASIS in the real world.  Since the founders were obsessed with the 80’s, most of the puzzles required knowing specific details about music and films.  So you’d read about how the main character had to play the arcade game Tempest and say, “OMG, Tempest was the only arcade game I ever had real skills at”.  Or they’d make reference to the song Subdivisions and you would remember that was your favorite Rush song.

In his followup book in the series, the four main characters have drifted apart.  They still run a multi-billion dollar enterprise together but also have developed lives in the real world.  At least most of them.  As you might imagine, they come back together to fight a common evil.  Cline has the team fighting the against the clock to prevent deaths in the real world by solving a quest in the virtual one. 

While the first book concentrated more on figuring out riddles than the details of individual quests, this book is the opposite.  Partly because the author places a time constraint on the whole affair.  Most activity involves players repeating something one of them has done before, but with specific variations.  And while references to John Hughes movies were fun in the first book, spending 50 pages in a world consisting of nothing but settings and characters from every Hughes film gets a bit exhausting.  It’s not bad, but prepare yourself to be a little overwhelmed.

The story starts raising concerns about how much time people spend in the fantasy world verses fixing anything in the original.  This line gets dropped along the way.  The main character grows personally in the real world, but at the same time makes the virtual world more enticing for others.  There is also some discussion about unleashing AI beings into “the world”.  Not sure I agree with the authors take.  Kind of like losing your hand in an explosion then saying, “nitroglycerin for everyone!”.

While not as titillating as the first book, Ready Player Two is a solid sequel.  There is room for a third, though I think he would need to drift away from 80’s pop culture.  The users of the OASIS span the globe and have moved on from “Weird Science” and Men Without Hats.