Photo: Hutton Supancic
While opinions on the quality of Ernest Cline’s breakout novel Ready Player One have been contentious since the day the book was published—ranging from “A soulless, shallow Snow Crash pastiche” to “a fun nostalgia exercise that is, admittedly, also a soulless, shallow Snow Crash pastiche”—the book’s success has been far more difficult to question. Adapted into a pretty successful blockbuster by Steven Spielberg, and a ridiculously widely read bestseller in its own right, Cline’s book about a pop culture scavenger hunt in a virtual world was a verified phenomenon. And, no less than any of the pop culture properties the book waxes such extensive, fetishistic nostalgia for, that success can only mean one thing: It’s sequel time.