Ready Player Two is the sequel that didn't need to be written.

I finished reading Ready Player Two this week by author, Ernest Cline. As a novel, it wasn't as good as the first installment which got made into a movie. However, even knowing this...knowing that it is generally impossible to catch lightning in a bottle twice in a row...I wasn't prepared for how "dystopian" the world of Ready Player One actually is. And maybe I should have been. In the first book, the character of Daito got murdered when he was thrown out a window by Sorrento. The event is shocking in the book (not seen in the movie), but it was easy to ignore some of those things (like the stacks getting blown up by IOI/Sorrento), because the Oasis was so much fun visualizing it all.

Ready Player Two picks up where the novel pretty much left off. It turns the page and quickly closes a chapter on the Wade and Samantha romance because Wade is pretty much a huge douchebag. He's like the stereotypical incel character that you hear about on the news, who is really into video games and gets so enraged when women rebuff him that he commits crimes. I was really surprised by this, but I probably shouldn't have been. Wade was always this character, I just refused to see it. Even though Wade shares "ownership" of the company they formed that took over the Oasis, he consistently talks over Samantha and doesn't listen to a thing that she says. She ends up breaking up with him after only a week, because he's changed so much.

Because Wade is Halliday's heir, he wears the "Robes of Anorak." This pretty much makes him a god in the Oasis. So, what does he do with that power? He monitors all the chats for anyone who disparages him in a public way, and then kills their character with a level 99 Finger of Death spell by teleporting to their location while invisible and then snipes them off. He also stalks his ex, Samantha (Artemis), by watching when she logs onto the Oasis, and then he sifts through her private conversations. It's actually super creepy, and I have no idea why Ernest Cline went this direction with Wade in this book.

At the soul of this book is a new discovery that means huge implications for the human race, and it is through this discovery that Wade regains an opportunity to patch things up with Artemis. However, it all seems just a bit too contrived that she'd forgive him for all the creepy things he does and immediately fall back into his arms (which is pretty much what ends up happening). The discovery is another Easter Egg left by Halliday in a corporate vault: a pair of glasses that when worn turn the entire Oasis into a holodeck simulation from Star Trek. In other words, you can feel the wind on your face, you can taste food, you can feel pain and pleasure, etc. All it requires is that anyone who wears it must fork over their brain patterns to this thing for up to twelve hours a day. Any more than this, and you would risk lobotomizing yourself, as the human brain cannot put up with that kind of connection for longer than that. And therein is the plot of the book: by setting a limit on this new headset, the plot has to take us there in a "what if" scenario that evolves into a huge world engulfing crisis.

When Wade announces the new headset to his friends who control the corporation, Aech and Shoto both think it is amazing. Artemis thinks the world isn't ready for the technology, and in many ways she's right. Once again, Wade votes her down and then they go on to patent and sell the glasses to the public. They make so much money on them that they are able to pay off the national debt of the United States. While Artemis/Samantha uses her share of the profits to try to improve the world they live in (the real world), Wade just thinks the planet is f*cked anyway and he, Aech, and Shoto spend their money creating a spaceship that they can fly to Proxima Centauri, a nearby star system that may have planets that can support life. The trip will take 43 years and they will just have their bodies plugged into the Oasis the entire time, so they won't care. Basically, pack up, skip town, and kiss the planet Earth goodbye. You can really see why Samantha wants nothing to do with Wade.

And then, the villain of the story shows up: Anorak. This was the avatar of the now dead Halliday character, but you come to find out that Anorak is a ghost in the machine. He's an artificial intelligence that can think for himself and has Halliday's memory as well as many of Halliday's worst vices that are very "incel-like." He asks Wade to solve a puzzle left behind by Halliday, and he has to do it within twelve hours. If not, then everyone...billions of people worldwide...will not be able to log out of the Oasis, and they will all experience brain death because they are all using those headsets that Wade sold. And this number includes Wade. The only major character who refused to wear one of those new headsets was Samantha, who still logged into the Oasis using the old haptic gear from the first book. She manages to log out, so Anorak tries to kill her by having the plane fall out of the sky (similar to the events of 9/11). 

And then the rest of the book is just puzzle solving to beat Anorak's timer (and to come up with a way to beat Anorak without having to destroy the Oasis with the big red button). The book has a happy ending, but in many ways it seems very contrived. I'm not sure why Wade and Samantha reconcile and become a couple again, but maybe it has something to do with personality disorders and codependency. 

Ready Player Two ended up being the book that I honestly think didn't need to be written. The new headset is cool, and so are the implications of what such technology could do for the human race. But for those saving graces, the nostalgia from the eighties became a bit much. I mean there's a part in the book where they have to take on seven different versions of the Artist formerly known as Prince in a musical competition to the death while being aided by Morris Day and Janet Jackson and the Rhythm Nation. I was like...eh...this is dumb. Entertaining...but dumb. If anything, reading Ready Player Two made me realize that the original story was always a depressing vision of the future of the Earth, and that if everyone had the ability to escape into the Oasis, then no one would ever interact in person with each other ever again. It would be the end of the human race...an extinction by apathy for real life. I think that I much preferred not knowing about all of that, and should have just left well enough alone with the first book, and it's somewhat "Happily Ever After" ending.

I know that the movie is being directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, and I think it is set to come out in 2022. I just hope that Spielberg does what he's famous for doing and that he changes practically everything in it. In tone, it should match the first movie. And I hope that he makes Wade into a likeable character and ditches all that creepy, stalker stuff. I also hope that the movie packs a powerful environmental message of hope, instead of going "all in" on Wade wanting to flee the solar system by using his wealth to escape a dying Earth. I also hope that they skip that battle with Prince. It went on for way too many pages.

For the Independence Day IWSG post we are asked to ponder what would make us quit writing.

 It's Wednesday, July 7th and Salt Lake City is in the middle of a historic drought and another heat wave. And it's also time for the monthly Insecure Writer's Support Group blogfest.

The Insecure Writer's Support Group was originally started by Alex J. Cavanaugh, who is an excellent science fiction writer. It's purpose is to share knowledge and inspire/encourage other writers. The rules for the blogfest are simple: you post the first Wednesday of every month. The post can be about writing, or you can take a turn at answering the monthly question which can be found HERE along with the signup.

The awesome co-hosts for the July 7 posting of the IWSG are Pat Garcia, Victoria Marie Lees, and Louise – Fundy Blue!

Now, and with that out of the way, why don't we answer the question.

July 7 question: What would make you quit writing?

This is an easy question to answer: not having any ideas. But (thus far) I've always had things that I want to write and/or talk about. My problem isn't that I don't have enough to write about. Rather, it is that I don't have the time, discipline, or the energy to complete all the projects that I want to do. I'm sure that I'm not the only one.

There are other more obvious answers to this question as well. Lets say I got disabled, could no longer use my hands and speech to text wasn't an option, or let's say that my brain wasn't working like it should. I remember reading about how Terry Pratchett succumbed to Alzheimer's disease prior to his death, and I thought...yeah that's one way to silence a writer forever.

Anyway, those are the answers to the July questions. I hope that all you writers are having a nice summer, and that things are working out well for you. I also hope that your creative well never runs dry.

The Apple TV adaptation of Foundation can't resemble the book at all if it expects watchers.

Apple TV released the first trailer for their adaptation of Foundation. I've included it below. The first season of the series comes out in the fall, and I will probably watch it. Having read the Foundation books, I'm actually surprised that these could be made into something watchable. From a reader standpoint, they were barely entertaining, with no main characters having any emotion or likeableness, and spanning a length of time that is absurd by modern-day fiction standards. If you haven't read them, imagine getting a slice of a character's day...perhaps heated dialogue with another character...and the rudimentary dressings of what Asimov believes will suffice to "set the scene." And then there's a break, and the next scene takes place fifty years later. Those characters are now dead, and their descendants find something that remotely connects back to that argument that took place fifty years prior. That's how Foundation lurches its way forward in its narrative.

The characters in Asimov's famous work are not really the story. It's the idea that this immense galactic empire is collapsing and that one man can foresee and prove that it will happen to the doom and detriment of all the civilizations that form the empire. So the empire IS the character. This doomsayer prophet using math and science doesn't convince many people. But those whom he does convince become his army to essentially work toward making sure that there is only a dark age that lasts a thousand years instead of thirty thousand years by preserving knowledge. This future-seeing man is Harry Seldon, and he checks in every once in a while with preprogrammed holograms of himself that provide instructions to people so that they can go about the tasks of ending the Dark Age of the galaxy within a single millennia.

But I read from a standpoint that characters are what make a story interesting. Without them, the story is just a summary of the rise and fall and resurrection of a galactic empire containing billions upon billions of people that I don't really care about. Asimov essentially asks us to care about civilization in these books, and the question I always have while reading is: why should I care? It's like being asked to care about a thousand people getting wiped out by a plague in Bangladesh. We gasp at how horrible that sounds, but none of us actually shed a tear (or very few at least). We don't know those people. It's just a number. "Oh...did you hear that a thousand people were killed in Myanmar?" It's that kind of thing. We never know more than the headline.

Look...you know I'm not a scientist. I'm not an archeologist. I don't really have an interest in studying the rise and fall of a fictional civilization. But therein is probably the audience for this kind of thing: scientists and archeologists. It's clear that Asimov wrote this book for those people, who read science fiction and were blown away that someone would write what is essentially a summary of the Roman Empire with an added "we're back" hook that takes place over so many centuries that the characters involved in the story are just footnotes. It's the "what if" scenario. "What if there was this huge civilization, and someone saw it was falling, and then they took steps to preserve knowledge so that the horrible barbaric period only lasted a thousand years instead of thirty thousand? Wow! Wouldn't that be interesting!" And it undeniably is to some people. For me, the hang-up is just that huge timeline. It's too big for me as I never get to know a character other than in the five pages they exist.

I can see the likes of astrophysicists like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson waxing poetic about Foundation. Though these people are super smart, they also wax poetic when talking about Earth history and cosmological time. "In this collection of a billion years...trees evolved...and there were no microorganisms that could digest the wood pulp when they fell because they hadn't evolved yet. So, it all got buried under volcanic ash and earth and became petrified...giving us vast petrified forests today." I mean...scientifically...it is interesting. But I don't really care about those trees, and it's hard for me to care about any animal that may have lived at that time. I just don't. That's what Foundation is...more or less.

Asimov as a writer has been compared to being the worst of the great writers. More than one person has pointed out that he has thin characters whose only spin is that they face and overcome intellectual challenges that Asimov poses through his writing. You can see that Asimov was amused over his plot twists and his big ideas every time you read Foundation or any of its sister books. I will say this about him: he writes very clearly, and all of the things he says are easy to understand. But his prose isn't pretty.

This all leads me back to the trailer for Foundation. Does it make me want to watch the series? Yeah...I will watch it. But they are going to have to depart from the books a lot, because successful television requires a "soul." And you only get that through emotional connection to characters. So they are going to have to slow down the narrative of the one-thousand years to give us characters whom we can slip into in order to see the events of the collapse of the empire, which are essentially just glossed over in the book. I mean...it's pretty much just a steady decline that is narratively talked about on just a few pages. This happened, followed by that, and now we will focus in on a world on the fringe that now finds itself by itself and in need of government, because government has collapsed. Hmm...what happens next for these poor people? Oh! A hologram from Harry Seldon left fifty years ago will provide clues! Some people watch said video...and then you never hear from them again because another fifty years has passed. But they did things with that knowledge that will be built on by others.

In other words...it's kind of boring.

It's weird that something like this could get published and lauded as so amazing. Foundation as it stands feels like a really well-developed outline. You know how you outline a book's plot? Well think of Foundation as that only being like 240 pages in length. That's what it feels like when you read it...an outline. But in it's age, there was nothing else like it. It was like Asimov was the greatest world-builder ever, but he never got past the world-building stage to build a story that took place in real time. So all  you get is world-building. And there's pages and pages of it, telling you about all the things that happened and when. Imagine all the Star Wars stuff and its immense history being boiled down to 240 pages of outline, telling you when Order 66 happened, when the emperor was defeated, what Jango Fett did, etc. I mean...it'd be great world-building, but you wouldn't care about any of those characters. That's how Foundation reads, more or less. It's a summary of things that happened.

How on Earth is any of that going to translate into a watchable television series? Our first clues are in the trailer embedded below:

James Gunn has actually got me a little excited to see the next installment of The Suicide Squad.

The new Suicide Squad trailer aired on F9 this weekend. It was my first trip back to theaters, and it was a small bit of normalcy despite extreme weather events being a constant reminder that our planet has been totally screwed over by selfish people. Despite the first outing of Suicide Squad being almost unwatchable (because it was so bad), I think that I'll be heading to theaters opening weekend for this one if for anything...just to get more of King Shark.

Ron Funches, who is the voice actor for King Shark on the animated show Harley Quinn, absolutely kills in the performances (pun intended). In the scene below, he greets everyone with a "Howdy!" and he seems to like shark jokes. If you don't know anything about Harley Quinn click on the embedded video below and watch the first time Harley meets Shark. It's rather fun. Also, I like Idris Elba way more than Will Smith, so I'm glad that Smith isn't in this one.

And here's the trailer for the new Suicide Squad movie from James Gunn. You probably have heard of Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy. I predict that the same magic may work for this group of misfits. Here's to hoping.

Pixar gave a strong wink to all us queers celebrating pride month in their June release of Luca

I watched Pixar's Luca this week. Just like other films from the Pixar Animation Studio, I liked how bold and beautiful it looked. The main characters of Luca and Alberto were pure and innocent, and they were very relatable in context, because this is the first movie that really broaches gay love. The fact that they are fish people (merfolk?) becomes a pretty strong metaphor by the end of the movie, when the grandma declares, "There will be people who won't accept him for who he is. But I don't think it will be a problem, because he seems to know how to find the right kind of people."

It's not the first movie that broached these kinds of topics. Call Me By Your Name, which was a wonderful coming-of-age story clearly meant for adult audiences, was also set in Italy and about two males who spent their summer together (and who got to know each other very well). Luca though is a children's movie...so the subtext is extremely subtle with jealous looks given by Alberto when his friend Luca seems to be bonding with the female in the movie named Giulia, who becomes a crucial part of their adventure. But in the end, Luca expresses the purest form of love for his friend by letting go of their dream to escape on a Vespa together to see the world. Instead, he sells it, and he uses the money to grant Luca's wish to go and attend school so that their one summer together just becomes a memory.

I think it's nice that Disney is starting to tell queer stories after decades of being in the zone of telling stories about white, straight characters. It's a baby step in the right direction to embrace on-screen diversity and representation. It's too bad it didn't make more of a splash. Pixar/Disney hardly marketed it at all. So people will essentially just have to stumble across it as a stealth-released Pixar movie on Disney+. The queerness of the story is subtle enough that those who don't look very deep will undoubtedly miss it, which will probably save Disney from having too much of a headache from the likes of Tucker Carlson. But the wink from the company is there. I saw it, and for a brief moment (at least) it brought me joy.

When people slow the pacing of their stories they end up better in almost every circumstance.

In thinking about Star Wars from my Monday post, it struck me once again how frenetic each episode of Star Wars is, whether it is in cartoon form, live-action, or in movie form. It's very much a hallmark of the way a Star Wars story is told. And I wonder why. I have a deeper appreciation for slower stories these days. I just finished a book wherein the main characters essentially got together to go and investigate a swamp and have a conversation with an immortal woman who could tell them all about the lands of the dead. That's it...that was the whole book. These days, most people might expect the travel to the swamp to be one chapter, the conversation with the woman who had knowledge about the lands of the dead to be another chapter, and then we are onto something new. Maybe an investigation of the lands of the dead for chapters 3 and 4?

Anyway, I'm glad that didn't happen in the book I read. It took all twenty-six of its chapters to do the above. And that would probably piss off a lot of people. But sometimes (I think) storytellers suffer from too much get up and go. Why do we need to visit three or four different planets in a Star Wars movie? What's wrong with just staying on one planet and that's it. I see the same thing in other franchises too (mostly kid stories...which may explain things as to why they are so frenetic). Why do we need so many characters? What's wrong with just having two or three? That seems like a good number.

I learned quite some time ago that sometimes I can get in a rush to want to get all of my ideas out in front of me. Whether I'm writing or talking, I can feel like there's a bottleneck happening, which can cause me to rush things before I think they are ready. What ends up happening is that the idea gets lost, or the thing I wanted to accomplish does not resonate like I thought it would. Pacing is everything to a story, and I've discovered that (for the most part) one should take it slow. It is better to err on being too slow than I think it is to err on the side of being too fast. However, I only say this because the kinds of stories that I like to read these days have to do with the character connections. Those need time to be nurtured in order to grow strong, and if the author tries to move along too quickly, then the whole thing ends up not making sense. Ultimately, it becomes unsatisfying.

As a result, I think I know why many movies written for kids now annoy me. The pacing is off...there is always too much going on. It makes me wonder why kids need all of that. Their brains should be in a place in life where they are actively seeing out causal relationships, which take time to build. So it's either kids are asking for this, or its a content generator's idea of what kids want to watch or listen to. And somewhere in this train of thinking, someone decided that throwing ideas like tennis balls coming from a machine was the right thing to do. That's how we get movies where a gajillion things are going on at the same time. The Transformer movies are nigh unwatchable because of this.

TL/DR version: The slow burn is good y'all.

That's my two cents. Any of you care to weigh in on pacing?

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is basically an enjoyable A-Team in space but it doesn't take many risks with its world-building.

Is anyone else watching the Star Wars series called The Bad Batch, which is on Disney +? I watched a few of the episodes this weekend, and I really like them. The story follows a group of clone troopers who have a bad microchip in them that made it possible for them to ignore Order 66 given by Emperor Palpatine, and to set off on their own in a galaxy that has gone full fascism to the max.

Thus far in the series, we have seen cameos from Bib Fortuna (Jaba the Hutt's MajorDomo), the Rancor that Luke killed (in adolescence it was playful and called "Moochie"), and the bounty hunter Fennec Shand (who is in the Mandalorian). In The Mandalorian Fennec is friends with Boba Fett and is played by Ming-Na Wen (who was also in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.).

I don't have many nitpicks with the series. The ones I do have are centered on the same complaints that I had with The Mandalorian. For example, the architecture of different areas of the galaxy more or less repeats itself. People (no matter what planet you happen to be on) still put the most important computer consoles out on these rickety things with no railing that are suspended over a huge drop. And the same old planets that you've seen before get to be set pieces yet again for another series. Tatooine is the worst of these. We can't ever seem to be able to get away from Tatooine. I suppose that we can chalk this up to world-building, and the fact that it is hard and complicated. Using characters and sites with which viewers are already familiar is much easier. However, they are taking small steps. We've seen a small village and another side of a Correllian city that we didn't get in the Solo movie. 

As for the subject matter of Star Wars, it seems spot on. Star Wars has always been pretty heavy and dark. In my opinion it started out as a commentary about American imperialism as pulp science fiction. The only thing that made it kid friendly was the tone. But the moral scales of the show has always kind of circled around killing Nazi-esque soldiers who are just following orders. And when you went one layer deeper, in many of these cases it was slaughtering genetic twins (which reminds us of some Concentration camp stuff). In The Bad Batch we have one clone in what I can only describe as "The A-Team in space" going 100% evil because the Kaminoans (who made him in a test tube) are amping up the malfunctioning genetic chip in his brain. We have yet to see where that goes, but I can hazard a guess that it won't be good.

Anyway, the series is obviously not done airing its first season. I took a much-needed break from other things I'm dealing with in my life to watch the show. I'd recommend it if you are a Star Wars fan, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the show if you are watching it.