Books by Cline, Ernest

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player One. New York: Broadway Books, 2011. ISBN 978-0-307-88744-3.

By the mid-21st century, the Internet has become largely subsumed as the transport layer for the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), a massively multiuser online virtual reality environment originally developed as a multiplayer game, but which rapidly evolved into a platform for commerce, education, social interaction, and entertainment used by billions of people around the world. The OASIS supports immersive virtual reality, limited only by the user's budget for hardware used to access the network. With top-of-the-line visors and sound systems, body motion sensors, and haptic feedback, coupled to a powerful interface console, a highly faithful experience was possible. The OASIS was the creation of James Halliday, a legendary super-nerd who made his first fortune designing videogames for home computers in the 1980s, and then re-launched his company in 2012 as Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS), with the OASIS as its sole product. The OASIS was entirely open source: users could change things within the multitude of worlds within the system (within the limits set by those who created them), or create their own new worlds. Using a distributed computing architecture which pushed much of the processing power to the edge of the network, on users' own consoles, the system was able to grow without bound without requiring commensurate growth in GSS data centres. And it was free, or almost so. To access the OASIS, you paid only a one-time lifetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, just like the quarter you used to drop into the slot of an arcade videogame. Users paid nothing to use the OASIS itself: their only costs were the hardware they used to connect (which varied widely in cost and quality of the experience) and the bandwidth to connect to the network. But since most of the processing was done locally, the latter cost was modest. GSS made its money selling or renting virtual real estate (“surreal estate”) within the simulation. If you wanted to open, say, a shopping mall or build your own Fortress of Solitude on an asteroid, you had to pay GSS for the territory. GSS also sold virtual goods: clothes, magical artefacts, weapons, vehicles of all kinds, and buildings. Most were modestly priced, but since they cost nothing to manufacture, were pure profit to the company.

As the OASIS permeated society, GSS prospered. Halliday remained the majority shareholder in the company, having bought back the share once owned by his co-founder and partner Ogden (“Og”) Morrow, after what was rumoured to be a dispute between the two the details of which had never been revealed. By 2040, Halliday's fortune, almost all in GSS stock, had grown to more than two hundred and forty billion dollars. And then, after fifteen years of self-imposed isolation which some said was due to insanity, Halliday died of cancer. He was a bachelor, with no living relatives, no heirs, and, it was said, no friends. His death was announced on the OASIS in a five minute video titled Anaorak's Invitation (“Anorak” was the name of Halliday's all-powerful avatar within the OASIS). In the film, Halliday announces that his will places his entire fortune in escrow until somebody completes the quest he has programmed within the OASIS:

Three hidden keys open three secret gates,
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits,
And those with the skill to survive these straits,
Will reach The End where the prize awaits.

The prize is Halliday's entire fortune and, with it, super-user control of the principal medium of human interaction, business, and even politics. Before fading out, Halliday shows three keys: copper, jade, and crystal, which must be obtained to open the three gates. Only after passing through the gates and passing the tests within them, will the intrepid paladin obtain the Easter egg hidden within the OASIS and gain control of it. Halliday provided a link to Anorak's Almanac, more than a thousand pages of journal entries made during his life, many of which reflect his obsession with 1980s popular culture, science fiction and fantasy, videogames, movies, music, and comic books. The clues to finding the keys and the Egg were widely believed to be within this rambling, disjointed document.

Given the stakes, and the contest's being open to anybody in the OASIS, what immediately came to be called the Hunt became a social phenomenon, all-consuming to some. Egg hunters, or “gunters”, immersed themselves in Halliday's journal and every pop culture reference within it, however obscure. All of this material was freely available on the OASIS, and gunters memorised every detail of anything which had caught Halliday's attention. As time passed, and nobody succeeded in finding even the copper key (Halliday's memorial site displayed a scoreboard of those who achieved goals in the Hunt, so far blank), many lost interest in the Hunt, but a dedicated hard core persisted, often to the exclusion of all other diversions. Some gunters banded together into “clans”, some very large, agreeing to exchange information and, if one found the Egg, to share the proceeds with all members. More sinister were the activities of Innovative Online Industries—IOI—a global Internet and communications company which controlled much of the backbone that underlay the OASIS. It had assembled a large team of paid employees, backed by the research and database facilities of IOI, with their sole mission to find the Egg and turn control of the OASIS over to IOI. These players, all with identical avatars and names consisting of their six-digit IOI employee numbers, all of which began with the digit “6”, were called “sixers” or, more often in the gunter argot, “Sux0rz”.

Gunters detested IOI and the sixers, because it was no secret that if they found the Egg, IOI's intention was to close the architecture of the OASIS, begin to charge fees for access, plaster everything with advertising, destroy anonymity, snoop indiscriminately, and use their monopoly power to put their thumb on the scale of all forms of communication including political discourse. (Fortunately, that couldn't happen to us with today's enlightened, progressive Silicon Valley overlords.) But IOI's financial resources were such that whenever a rare and powerful magical artefact (many of which had been created by Halliday in the original OASIS, usually requiring the completion of a quest to obtain, but freely transferrable thereafter) came up for auction, IOI was usually able to outbid even the largest gunter clans and add it to their arsenal.

Wade Watts, a lone gunter whose avatar is named Parzival, became obsessed with the Hunt on the day of Halliday's death, and, years later, devotes almost every minute of his life not spent sleeping or in school (like many, he attends school in the OASIS, and is now in the last year of high school) on the Hunt, reading and re-reading Anorak's Almanac, reading, listening to, playing, and viewing everything mentioned therein, to the extent he can recite the dialogue of the movies from memory. He makes copious notes in his “grail diary”, named after the one kept by Indiana Jones. His friends, none of whom he has ever met in person, are all gunters who congregate on-line in virtual reality chat rooms such as that run by his best friend, Aech.

Then, one day, bored to tears and daydreaming in Latin class, Parzival has a flash of insight. Putting together a message buried in the Almanac that he and many other gunters had discovered but failed to understand, with a bit of Latin and his encyclopedic knowledge of role playing games, he decodes the clue and, after a demanding test, finds himself in possession of the Copper Key. His name, alone, now appears at the top of the scoreboard, with 10,000 points. The path to the First Gate was now open.

Discovery of the Copper Key was a sensation: suddenly Parzival, a humble level 10 gunter, is a worldwide celebrity (although his real identity remains unknown, as he refuses all media offers which would reveal or compromise it). Knowing that the key can be found re-energises other gunters, not to speak of IOI, and Parzival's footprints in the OASIS are scrupulously examined for clues to his achievement. (Finding a key and opening a gate does not render it unavailable to others. Those who subsequently pass the tests will receive their own copies of the key, although there is a point bonus for finding it first.)

So begins an epic quest by Parzival and other gunters, contending with the evil minions of IOI, whose potential gain is so high and ethics so low that the risks may extend beyond the OASIS into the real world. For the reader, it is a nostalgic romp through every aspect of the popular culture of the 1980s: the formative era of personal computing and gaming. The level of detail is just staggering: this may be the geekiest nerdfest ever published. Heck, there's even a reference to an erstwhile Autodesk employee! The only goof I noted is a mention of the “screech of a 300-baud modem during the log-in sequence”. Three hundred baud modems did not have the characteristic squawk and screech sync-up of faster modems which employ trellis coding. While there are a multitude of references to details which will make people who were there, then, smile, readers who were not immersed in the 1980s and/or less familiar with its cultural minutiæ can still enjoy the challenges, puzzles solved, intrigue, action, and epic virtual reality battles which make up the chronicle of the Hunt. The conclusion is particularly satisfying: there may be a bigger world than even the OASIS.

A movie based upon the novel, directed by Steven Spielberg, is scheduled for release in March 2018.

August 2017 

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player Two. New York: Ballantine Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1-5247-6133-2.

Ernest Cline's Ready Player One was an enormous success, blending an imaginative but plausible extrapolation of massively multiplayer online role-playing games and virtual worlds into a mid-21st century network called the OASIS, which has subsumed the Internet and its existing services into an immersive shared virtual world encompassing communication, entertainment, education, and commerce. Ready Player One chronicled the quest of hunters for the Easter Egg hidden by the deceased co-creator of the OASIS, which would confer sole ownership and control over the OASIS on its finder, with independent egg hunters (“gunters”) contending with a corporation bent on turning the OASIS into an advertising-cluttered Hell and perfectly willing to resort to murder and mayhem to achieve its nefarious designs.

James Halliday, who hid the Egg, was obsessed with every aspect of 1980s popular culture: film, music, television, fads, and video games, and the quest for the Egg involved acquiring and demonstrating encyclopedic knowledge equal to his own. The story is thus marinated in 1980s nostalgia, and has a strong appeal for those who lived through that era, which made Ready Player One a beloved instant classic and best-seller, from which Steven Spielberg made a not-entirely-awful 2018 feature film.

With the quest and fate of the OASIS resolved at the end of the original novel, readers were left to wonder what happens next, and they had nine years to wait before a sequel appeared to answer that question. And thus, Ready Player Two, which is set just a few years after Parzival and his bang of gunters find the Egg and assume control of the OASIS, was eagerly awaited. And now we have it in our hands.

Oh dear.

One common reaction among readers who have made it through this sequel or abandoned it in disgust and dismay is that it “reads like fan fiction”. But that is to disparage the genre of fan fiction, some of which is quite good, entertaining, and obviously labours of love. This reads like bad fan fiction, written by somebody who doesn't get out enough, obsessed with “transgression” of the original story and characters. This fails in just about every way possible. While the original novel was based upon a plausible extrapolation of present-day technology into the future, here we have a randomly assembled midden of utterly unbelievable things, seemingly invented on whim in order to move the plot along, most of which were developed in just a few years and in almost complete secrecy. Rather than try to artfully give a sense for how this novel “transgresses” even the most forgiving reader's ability to suspend disbelief, I'll just step behind the curtain and make an incomplete list of things we're expected to accept as the landscape in which the plot is set. Many of these are spoilers, so if you care about such things, don't read them until you've had a crack at the book (or it has had a crack at you, as the case may be).

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.   (Show Spoilers) (Hide Spoilers)

• James Halliday, before his death, funded the successful development of an Oasis Neural Interface (ONI), which provides a full, bidirectional, link to the neurons in a user's brain, allowing complete stimulation of all senses and motor control over an avatar in the OASIS.
• The ONI is completely non-invasive: it works by sensors it places on the outside of the skull.
• The development of the ONI was conducted in complete secrecy, and was not disclosed until a trigger set by Halliday before his death revealed it to the finder of the Egg.
• The ONI is able to provide a fully realistic experience of the OASIS virtual world to the wearer. For example, when an ONI wearer eats an apple in the virtual world, they have the sensation of crunching into the fruit, smelling the juice, and tasting the flesh, even though these have not been programmed into the simulation.
• The ONI can, in a brief time, make a complete scan of its wearer's brain and download this to the OASIS. This scan is sufficient to create an in-world realisation of the person's consciousness.
• Halliday made such a scan of his own brain, creating (in total secrecy) the first artificial general intelligence (AGI), which he called Anorak. In attempting to modify this AI, he caused it to go insane and become malevolent, but the lovable nerd Halliday let it continue to inhabit the OASIS.
• Every time a user logs into the OASIS, the ONI makes a nearly-instantaneous complete backup of their brain, sufficient to create a conscious intelligent copy inside the simulation. This has been done in complete secrecy, and not only OASIS users, but its new owners are unaware of this.
• The ONI can be used a maximum of 12 hours at a time, after which (the same precise time for all wearers, regardless of their individual physiology) it causes severe and irreversible neural trauma. Disconnection from the OASIS without a proper log-out can leave the user in a permanent coma. Regulators are perfectly fine with such a technology being deployed to billions of people, relying on the vendor's assurance that safeguards will prevent such calamities.
• Over a period of three years, largely in secrecy until it leaked out, Parzival and three of his partners have had built, at a cost of US$300 billion dollars, an interstellar spacecraft with a fusion drive in which they plan to make a 47 year voyage to Proxima Centauri to “search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along.” They plan to set out on this voyage without first sending a probe to determine whether there is a habitable planet at Proxima Centauri or having a Plan B in case there isn't one when they get there. Oh, and this starship is supposed to get its power from its “solar panel array and batteries” for the four decades it will be nowhere near a star.
• Halliday, after creating the flawed artificial intelligence Anorak, leaves open the possibility that it can seize control of the OASIS from his designated heir.
• Because ONI users logged into the OASIS are effectively unconscious and completely vulnerable to attack in real life (which they call “the earl”), the well-heeled opt for an “immersion vault” to protect themselves. Gregarious Simulation Systems' (GSS) top of the line was MoTIV, the “mobile tactical immersion vault”, [which] “looked more like a heavily armed robotic spider than a coffin. It was an armored escape vehicle and all-terrain weapons platform, featuring eight retractable armored legs for navigating all forms of terrain, and a pair of machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on each side of its armored chassis—not to mention a bulletproof acrylic cockpit canopy for its occupant.” The authorities are apparently happy with such gear being sold to anybody who can pay for it.
• The rogue AI Anorak is able to bypass all of GSS's engineering, quality control, and deployment safeguards to push a software update, “infirmware”, on more than half a billion ONI users, which traps them in the simulation, unable to log out, and destined for catastrophic brain damage after the twelve hour limit is reached. This includes four of the five owners of GSS. And “Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they've never seen before”—and it worked the very first time it was mass deployed.
• Despite having the lives of half a billion hostages, including themselves, in their hands and with the twelve hour maximum immersion time in the ONI ticking away, Parzival and partners find plenty of time to wisecrack, taunt one another about their knowledge or lack thereof of obscure pop culture, and costume changes.

  Art3mis snapped her fingers and her avatar's attire changed once again. Now she wore Annie Potts's black latex outfit from her first scene in Pretty in Pink, along with her punk-rock porcupine hairdo, dangling earrings, and dinner-fork bracelet.

  “Applause, applause, applause,” she said, doing a slow spin so that we could admire the attention to detail she'd put into her Iona cosplay.

• On top of all of these inanities, the main characters, who were just likeable, nerdy “mixed-up kids” a few years ago, have now become shrill, tedious, “woke” scolds.

  “Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?”

  Parzival: Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She'd been DMAB—designated male at birth. … Around the same time, she'd changed her avatar's sex classification to øgender, a brand-new option GSS had added due to popular demand. People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn't limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation.

• The battles, the battles….

  The rest of the Original 7ven joined the fight too. Jimmy Jam and Monte Moir each wielded a modified red Roland AXIS-1 keytar that fired sonic funk blast waves out of its neck each time a chord was played on it. Jesse Johnson fired sonic thunderbolts from the pickups of his Fender Voodoo Stratocaster, while Terry Lewis did the same with his bass, and Jellybean Johnson stood behind them, firing red lightning skyward with his drumsticks, wielding them like two magic wands. Each of the band members could also fire a deadly blast of sonic energy directly from their own mouths, just by shouting the word “Yeow!” over and over again.

  “Yeow?” … Yawn.

Spoilers end here.   (Hide Spoilers)

I'm not going to even discuss the great quest, the big reveal, or the deus in machina switcheroo at the very end. After wrecking an interesting imagined world, destroying characters the reader had come to know and like in their first adventure, and boring the audience with over-the-top descriptions, obscure pop culture trivia, and ridiculous made-up reasons to plug all of the myriad holes in the plot, by the time I got to the end I was well past caring about any of them.

December 2020