A.V. Club review is out.
http://www.avclub.com/review/ready-player-one-authors-follow-armada-pale-imitat-221974
To no one's surprise, its the same thing under a different coat of paint but worse.
I understand that different reviewers reviewed this and RPO, across several different years, but almost nothing in the review establishes how merely being a retread of RPO and increasing evidence dude's a one-trick pony actually causes the book to tumble from an A to a D. I would like to see if the reviewer would agree with the RPO A, would have agreed at the time but came to sour on it due to post-release discussion about the former, or would have given RPO a poor grade as well.
I'm not accusing the author of hopping on a bandwagon. I read RPO in April so beyond knowing it was acclaimed I knew very little about the book's original reception. But I wonder if it's become fashionable to be embarrassed about the celebration of arrested development and geek insularity in a way that it wasn't a few years ago, when there was a little less geek culture in the world and we only had one terrible 9-figure shitfest cg superhero movie a year instead of 5.
When I read RPO, I read it on a vacation with no internet access, so I wasn't looking up what other people were saying. I do remember that the AVClub had given it an A and that it got pretty wide acclaim and buzz around release and was successful. I did know it was a tribute to video games. As I read it, I felt it was, on a positive side, somewhat page turny. I thought there were occasionally interesting worldbuilding elements. I thought there were parts of the plot that seemed generally coherent. Around the point where P4rziv4l enters the first dungeon, the book starts to take a dive and becomes increasingly hyperactive, arbitrary, and nonsensical. The whole way through, the characters are very thin, the prose is abominable (especially the diction: Cline has a very narrow vocabulary and uses the same few expressions endlessly;
cheshire cat smile rubenesque curves), every character has the exact same voice. Frankly, it read like a first stab at a self-published novel by a mildly creative author in bad need of restraint. I was surprised to find out that this was not self-published, later on. Nearer to the end when the book becomes an orgy of animu power level believe in your heart nonsense, the flaws become even more loud. Probably the only thing that feels at all human on any level I related to in the entire book was the brief discussion about the falling out between Ogden Morrow and James Halliday.
The Tor review says:
this love letter to the pop culture thats become so prevalent today is let down by a central character nowhere near as credible as Wade Watts was
How on earth was Wade Watts credible? We had a Simple Plan level "no one understands me" lash-out against his Dustley cartoon villain caretakers in his slum town. The book glosses over his school attendance. His devotion to geeky stuff is, I guess, relatable but we never seem him talk about themes or understanding. I can't remember exactly what is referenced and what isn't but as a hypothetical, he doesn't learn from LOTR the value of friendship and the importance of protecting yourself from your own worst influences; rather, he learns to quote the script verbatim. He finds some sort of secret nerd cave paradise in the slums where he can work on his video games and not have to put up with his family, which I guess is supposed to be relatable to kids who found spots they could play in the woods by their subdivision or something? Then his whole city gets ultra-nuked and we get about a paragraph where he reflects on the death of everyone he's ever known before moving on. Then he gets ultra-rich and sits in his spartan space age apartment where he uses special shampoo that removes his... wait, body hair, what? So he just sits around with no eyebrows??? Errr, okay... and gets buff from using a robo workout machine until his eGirlfriend gets mad at him???
Here's a key example of why Wade Watts is not credible: I do not believe that there is a world where memorizing Ferris Bueller will help you save the world. But given the fact that there is such a world, I do not believe EvilCorp or whatever it was called would be unable to hire someone who has memorized Ferris Bueller. We are literally never told what makes Wade the hero, what qualifies him. We're given 50-odd pages of how he's a schlub who gets made fun of because he has low-level equipment, we're led to believe there are hundreds of millions of full-time oo-logists, and all the friendly characters we meet seem to be at least as skilled as Wade is at the nonsense people are expected to be skilled in... but yet Wade is the most powerful king nerd... because... uh??? Well I guess because that's how the book was written.
Can someone lay out a simple case for how Wade Watts could be described as credible. Ideally if someone could give me other examples of credible and non-credible protagonists. I'm not a very well-read guy so maybe I'm missing thing, but this is not my understanding of a credible protagonist at all. Do I not understand the word credible?
