51 pages • 1 hour read
Ernest ClineReady Player Two
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Nostalgia as a Double-Edged Sword
The worlds Cline crafts in Ready Player One and Ready Player Two betray the author’s deep, nostalgic love for pop culture—particularly music and film from the 1980s and content inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Whenever Cline’s characters step into the OASIS—where roughly 90 percent of the book takes place—they are bombarded by imagery related to Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, the Smiths, Prince, Dungeons & Dragons, and John Hughes movies. Cline is on record as having written Halliday as a generational peer to himself, allowing him to create the OASIS in a way that reflects his own cultural obsessions.
Though steeped in nostalgia, the narrative posits that a life lived with such intimate connections to pop culture can be painful. One example comes early in the text, when Wade feels compelled to block all references to the song “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls because it reminds him of Art3mis. Later, this dynamic has potentially grievous consequences for Wade’s hopes of collecting the Seven Shards, when he finds himself woefully unprepared to solve Tolkien-based puzzles on Arda I because Tolkien is Art3mis’s favorite author.
Investing so much of one’s identity into an artist also poses problems for Aech. Growing up queer, Aech looked to Prince for inspiration because his songs celebrated sexuality in many forms that often broke with the norms of the straight world. This gave her the courage to embrace her sexual identity. When Prince disavowed the LGBTQIA+ community after becoming a Jehovah’s Witness later in life, Aech felt betrayed because of how his music helped her. Thus, for her, the Afterworld planet is a refuge where the Princes of yesteryear exist almost as museum pieces, untouched by the later political and religious stances that Aech believes contradict what the artist stood for.
Art3mis is another character who has an uneasy relationship with nostalgia. While navigating the Shermer planet, where all her favorite John Hughes plotlines play out, Art3mis acknowledges that, when viewed in 2048, these films reflect serious issues regarding representation in ’80s media. The most glaring example is Sixteen Candles, which features a racist Asian American stereotype. Art3mis also points to the reflexive misogyny of Duckie, who is the original romantic lead of Pretty in Pink. But Art3mis gets the chance to revise the ending of Pretty in Pink to make it less problematic. This is, effectively, a virtual staging of fan fiction—a genre of writing in which fans of existing characters or properties craft their own stories.
Information Technology’s Impact on Empathy
One of the biggest debates explored in the book is the extent to which the OASIS—and ONI, specifically—fosters empathy. This is at the core of Wade and Art3mis’s broader dispute over ONI. They both agree on the potential ONI shows in improving empathy to some degree—after all, Art3mis encourages underrepresented individuals around the world to use it to tell their stories. However, she lacks Wade’s overarching excitement for ONI’s empathy-creating capabilities, which fundamentally drive all of his defenses of the interface. For example, on one of the many occasions in which Wade speaks of the “whole new kind of empathy” (68) developed through ONI, Art3mis dismisses him with a reference to the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, a group of minds connected in perfect harmony for the purpose of conquest and violence, to the detriment of free thought.
Although there is nothing like ONI in the world today, the debate over its impact on empathy reflects similar debates regarding information technology in the 21st century, particularly surrounding social media. Wade’s defenses of ONI echo arguments made by early adopters of social media; they believed that creating a forum where underrepresented voices can share their stories without passing through standard media gatekeepers would make the world more understanding and open toward these views. But as these networks become subject to algorithms designed to increase entertainment and engagement, social media platforms may only amplify the effects of polarization and confirmation bias. Given the extent to which Wade resembles the Silicon Valley corporate hivemind in ethos and behavior, it is very likely that this same echo chamber dynamic plays out on ONI.
Moreover, events in the book support the notion that ONI’s capacity to improve empathy are overblown. For example, Wade claims to have a better understanding of transgender and nonbinary individuals thanks to ONI’s ability to serve up near-endless permutations of sexual experiences. This argument, specious to begin with, falls apart when one sees how Wade reacts to L0hengrin’s identity as a trans woman not with empathy but with a fetishistic curiosity.
Finally, the reader is told that Halliday developed a sense of empathy after seeing the world through Kira’s eyes and feeling what she feels. While that could be true, the characters’ contention that technology improves empathy seems to rest on a premise that voyeurism equates to empathy. Many would argue instead that human interaction is a far more effective way to bring about mutual understanding. This latter point is supported near the end of the novel, when Wade finds that the experience of watching Og and Kira embrace when they are reunited has a far more profound effect on him than any of his experiences reliving moments from Kira’s perspective.
Posthuman-Transhumanism as a Way Forward
Pioneered by the Belgian-born Iranian American philosopher FM-2030, transhumanism is the idea that technologies should be developed for the purpose of enhancing humanity’s mental and physical abilities.
The OASIS is, in many ways, a transhumanist technology because it allows individuals to navigate a virtual world indistinguishable from reality in a healthy body. One example is Art3mis’s grandmother, Ev3lyn, who got to experience a virtual life as her real body succumbed to cancer. Wade mentions other applications of ONI and the OASIS that fit into a transhumanist framework, like allowing blind people to see and paralyzed people to walk in an environment that is perceived to be as real as anywhere else.
Wade—and his AI replica—takes this a step further into the realm of posthuman-transhumanism, which suggests that human consciousness is best served by being severed from material bodies and their accompanying mortality. As digital Wade flies off into the cosmos, he proudly announces, “We were witnessing the dawn of the posthuman era. The Singularity by way of simulacra and simulation. [...] [Halliday] had delivered all of us unto this digital paradise” (359).
Wade’s embrace of posthumanism, which is shared by many Silicon Valley founders in the real world, has almost a religious bent. With climate change posing an existential threat to the planet, some take a view that is straight out of the New Testament’s Revelations: accepting the apocalypse if it means they will be one of the lucky few to experience the rapture, in this case, having their consciousness uploaded to a supercomputer. Like some religious folks, posthumanists welcome the idea of an eternal life through technological means without much in the way of interrogation. In the Epilogue, Wade says, “And best of all, we’re going to live forever. I will never have to lose them, and they will never have to lose me” (365).
There seem to be some major metaphysical flaws in these hopes. For example, just because a digital copy of one’s consciousness exists does not necessarily mean that person has attained eternal life. Consider Halliday’s digital replica, which is clearly an inaccurate depiction of Halliday, given its villainous actions. And in the end, the flesh-and-blood Wade seems to prefer a different, more traditional kind of posterity: passing on his by fathering a child. This comparison can implicate that, the moment digital Wade departed, the two no longer remained the same person. In any case, the book poses fundamental questions about whether posthuman-transhumanism is a plausible or preferable future for humanity.
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By Ernest Cline
