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.
Thus Deadline reporting today that Cline has set a publication date for Ready Player Two, a sequel novel that will return to the dystopic world of Wade Watts, OASIS, and a universe in which the ability to recite the script to Wargames from memory is a deadly-serious survival skill. There’s no word yet on what material the book will cover—fingers crossed for a chapter where Wade has to play through that fake video game with the ice wizard that Tom Hanks is always playing in Big—but it’ll arrive on bookshelves (digital or otherwise) on November 24. Pre-orders for the novel are already open, with plans to release the sequel novel in every language under the sun also apparently forthcoming.