MixedWired (UK)Like its predecessor, it’s a tedious slog through arcane pop culture references – The Silmarillion, the music of Prince, the movies of John Hughes – sprinkled in so lazily that you could replace them with your own favourites, or swap them right out and be left with a much shorter, and probably better book ... Cline is back with a sequel that has all the same flaws as the original, but few of its plus sides ... [It] reads as if someone has introduced the GPT-3 text-generation algorithm to a copy of VH1’s I Love the 1980s (in fact, someone actually used an AI to try and predict the plot, with eerily effective results) ... Now there’s nothing particularly wrong with that – people who love those things will probably enjoy this book – but it is the same shtick as the original. And it’s a shame, because underneath all the movie quotes and reenacted scenes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, there are some interesting ideas in Ready Player Two about human-machine interfaces, virtual reality, and the ethics of interstellar travel.