If you're wondering why #ReadyPlayerTwo is getting such a brutal reception, I'm happy to explain.

A thread. https://amzn.to/2HvRBEp 

At some point in the late 70s / early 80s, corporate America realised it needed a way to market products to young white American men.

It settled on science fiction - rebranded as scifi - as the perfect vehicle.

I've written in detail about how corporate marketing defined the geek / nerd identity.

Scifi became the generalised label for any and all content designated for this demographic. https://twitter.com/damiengwalter/status/1309130738554548228

TLDR

This entailed a degradation of science fiction, from a strange boundaryless art form of wild futurism and philosophical speculation, into trash culture.

Not surprisingly, people who remember what science fiction was (and often still is) feel kinda sick over this.

It also resulted in the sad and sickening re-definition of "scifi" as a near exclusively white, male and American thing

where before it had been global, diverse, experimental

to exploit science fiction as a marketing vehicle aimed at American boys, it's diversity was deleted

This artificial narrowing of science fiction is what the war over the Hugo awards back in 2015/16 was about

the Sad Puppies wanted science fiction to stay narrowly aimed at them

fortunately, the Rebel Alliance blew up their Death Star, and the Pups are still hiding

What does this have to do with #ReadyPlayerTwo you say?

Welp.

Having fought a culture war to claim back science fiction literature as something more than a corporate marketing vehicle for the selling of shite to American boys

here comes Ernest Cline to take it right back

The Ready Player franchise is a singularity in the space time continuum of all that was most degraded and wrong with scifi

an Ouroboros of white male fan culture eating it's own tail

a Nerd Centipede re-consuming its own bullshit narrative of self-glorification

Not only was Ready Player One the product of the degradation of science fiction into a corporate marketing vehicle

it was simultaneously a CELEBRATION of that degradation

a Greatest Hits of the the emptiest, cheapest moments of Scifi-As-Marketing-Strategy

Now here we are almost a decade later

Armada was panned even by people who loved RP1

Spielberg's RP1 was an epic flop

AND the science fiction book community has irrevocably changed from where it was in 2011

but here come the publishers...

...spending 90% of this year's total marketing budgets on pushing #ReadyPlayerTwo as the big hit of the year

you WILL pay attention to this book

at the expense of many, many much better works of science fiction, by many more gifted authors

So that brutal response to #ReadyPlayerTwo is basically science fiction's immune response kicking in

Ernest Cline is a toxic pathogen infecting our respiratory tract by way of being forced down our throats

brutal criticism of his shite writing is our t-cell's working