In ‘Prepared Player Two,’ Author Ernest Cline Goes Further Into The Virtual World

9 min readNov 25, 2020

Nerds, geeks and gamers are cheering as “Prepared Player Two” hits shelves on Tuesday.

It’s the spin-off of Ernest Cline’s 2011 top rated advanced sci-fit novel “Prepared Player One.” Cline’s tragic world was adjusted into a film by Steven Spielberg in 2018.

The primary book happens in a hopeless future: The Earth is desolated by environmental change and individuals invest the greater part of their energy inside “Desert spring” — an augmented simulation world made by capricious game planner James Halliday. He’s a legend according to OASIS clients who are tormented by genuine social issues and squashed by financial fiasco.

There’s even notice of a maverick infection.

In the midst of the Covid pandemic, it might appear to be prophetic. However, the dad of two little girls says he would not like to see the tragic world he imagined on paper to happen as expected.

“I don’t need them to experience childhood in a future like that,” he says. “So I’m trusting that I’m not as prophetic as it as of now appears.”

Set in 2045, OASIS replaces the web. Individuals in OASIS go to class and work inside the domains of augmented reality. In the initial pages of “Prepared Player One,” Halliday passes on, giving up his fortune and all out control of his brainchild.

Hero Wade Watts, just a young person, is dependent on Halliday’s virtual universe. Alongside a few of his companions, Watts follows the maker’s last mission to discover Easter eggs covered up all through OASIS to open control of OASIS itself.

“Prepared Player Two” shows the aftermath of their legacy, Cline says.

“I sort of show them battling with the morals and the repercussions of their innovation and how it influences individuals’ lives,” he says, comparing it to the cutting edge situations looked by creators of famous online media stages.

The subsequent novel clues at the headway of innovation and the risks that join it. As computerized reasoning gets further and more profound in the current thousand years, Cline says people “must be cautious” with all innovation since it’s never essentially “dark or white.”

“I think any innovation that is that ground-breaking and utilized by that numerous individuals, billions of individuals around the globe, there’s continually going to be a decent side to it and a terrible side to it,” he says. “So I attempt to show the characters grappling with that.”

Nine years have slipped by since the distribution of “Prepared Player One,” and computer generated reality is no longer sci-fi. Organizations, for example, Oculus and VIVE are attempting to propel present-day augmented reality innovation, he says. Cline says they took motivation from his 2011 novel.

In the beginning of Oculus, Cline says the organization had a gathering room named after OASIS and gave out “Prepared Player One” duplicates to each worker upon their recruiting.

“They disclosed to me that there were sure things that I envisioned in the book, similar to things depicting the augmented simulation interface, that they just lifted discount, similar to Oculus Home,” he says.

He views himself as fortunate to have envisioned computer generated experience at the cusp of its blast, he says.

As innovation quickly advances, the prognosticator says complete vivid augmented experience is “unavoidable.” In “Prepared Player Two,” he says he presented the possibility of a cerebrum PC interface, the “last advance in the development of computer games and computer generated reality when the reproduction gets unclear from reality.”

At the present time, trailblazers in Silicon Valley are chipping away at mind PC interfaces and encouraging human preliminaries, he says. Individuals enthusiastically have gadgets placed into their bodies to test the framework, he says.

While that may cause worry for some, Cline says there are extraordinary clinical applications subsequently, for example, cameras wired into the mind that assist daze with peopling see and cochlear inserts that help those with hearing misfortune.

The issue is realizing how much people should surrender their lives to this cutting edge innovation and when society has arrived at a final turning point. Computer generated reality can become irresistible, much like online media is for some. Furthermore, as the innovation improves, “the motivation to escape totally from reality would get more prominent and more noteworthy,” Cline says.

Sci-fi and dream essayists regularly utilize their foundation to address certifiable issues. In his first book, Cline carried attention to the likely catastrophe of environmental change. In “Prepared Player Two,” he says he addressed compassion — or its absence.

“I think compassion is something we are in desperate need of,” he says.

In the subsequent novel, he depicts a compassion machine as a component of the cerebrum PC interface framework. The machine can spike OASIS clients to imagine another person’s perspective, he clarifies, something he accepts would improve the human species.

“I figure it very well may be enormously helpful if there was an innovation that could instruct individuals to be sympathetic. It would improve the world a much spot,” he says. “I think a ton of the issues that we’re confronting right currently could be followed back to an absence of sympathy.”

Cline appreciates taking an interest in computer generated simulation, particularly during the pandemic. He says he bought Oculus Quest headsets for friends and family so they assemble in a mutual virtual world while being actually inaccessible. Cline and his better half, author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, commended their wedding commemoration this mid year on augmented simulation, an occasion that caused it to seem like they had “dominated social separating.”

Enthusiasts of “Prepared Player One” can have confidence that Spielberg had early admittance to the spin-off novel, Cline says. In the chief’s criticism, Spielberg mentioned more appearances of his #1 character, Nolan Sorrento.

“I believe this is on the grounds that he’s truly old buddies with Ben Mendelsohn, the entertainer who depicts Nolan Sorrento in our film,” he says. “So I disclosed to him I would put more Sorrento in the book and that I would likewise tell Ben Mendelsohn that Steven was paying special mind to him.”

While not affirmed, Cline says “there’s a decent possibility” the subsequent book will make it to movie theaters later on.

Book Excerpt: ‘Ready Player Two’

After I won Halliday’s challenge, I remained disconnected for nine straight days — another individual record.

At the point when I at last logged back in to my OASIS account, I was sitting in my new corner office on the highest level of the GSS high rise in midtown Columbus, Ohio, planning to begin my gig as one of the organization’s new proprietors. The other three were as yet dissipated over the globe: Shoto had flown back home to Japan to assume control over activities at GSS’s Hokkaido division. Aech was appreciating an all-encompassing get-away in Senegal, a nation she’d longed for visiting for what seems like forever, in light of the fact that her precursors had come from that point. What’s more, Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to get together her assets and bid farewell to her grandma, Evelyn. She wasn’t expected to show up here in Columbus for an additional four days, which appeared to be an unending length of time. I expected to divert myself until our get-together, so I chose to log back in to the OASIS and evaluate a couple of a greater amount of the superuser capacities my symbol presently had.

I moved into my spic and span best in class OASIS inundation rig, a Habashaw OIR-¬9400, at that point put on my visor and haptic gloves and started the login grouping. My symbol returned where I’d keep going logged out, on the planet Chthonia, remaining external the entryways of Castle Anorak. As I’d foreseen, there were a large number of different symbols previously assembled there, all standing by persistently for me to show up. As per the newsfeed features, some of them had been stayed outdoors there the entire week — since the time I’d revived them in the outcome of our epic fight against the Sixers.

In my first official go about as one of GSS’s new proprietors, only a couple hours after the battle finished, I’d approved our administrators to reestablish all the things, credits, and force levels those chivalrous clients had lost, alongside their symbols. I idea it was the least we could do to compensate them for their assistance, and Samantha, Aech, and Shoto had concurred. It was the main choice we’d decided on as the organization’s new co-proprietors.

When the symbols in my region spotted me, they started to run toward me, surrounding me from all sides on the double. To try not to get mobbed, I transported inside the palace, into Anorak’s investigation — a room in the most noteworthy pinnacle that only i could enter, on account of the Robes of Anorak I presently wore. The obsidian-dark article of clothing invested my symbol with the exceptional forces Halliday’s own symbol had once had.

I looked around the jumbled examination. Here, a little more than seven days back, Anorak had announced me the victor of Halliday’s challenge and changed my life for eternity.

My eyes fell upon the canvas of a dark monster that held tight the divider. Underneath it stood an elaborate precious stone platform with a gem encrusted cup laying on top of it. Furthermore, supported inside the vessel was the item I’d spent endless years looking for: Halliday’s silver Easter egg.

I strolled over to appreciate it, and that was the point at which I saw something unusual — an engraving on the egg’s generally immaculate surface. One that unquestionably hadn’t been there when I’d last observed it, nine days sooner.

No different symbols could go into this room. Nobody could’ve messed with the egg. So there was just a single way that engraving could’ve arrived. Halliday himself probably modified it to show up on the egg’s surface. It might have showed up just after Anorak gave me his robes, and I’d quite recently been too occupied to even think about noticing.

I bowed down to peruse the engraving: GSS — thirteenth Floor — Vault #42–8675309.

In ‘Prepared Player Two,’ Author Ernest Cline Goes Further Into The Virtual World

Book Excerpt: ‘Ready Player Two’

Written by Amarsk Skurds