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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like The Amplifier Protocol

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Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Friday
                  Friday

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1982

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                  Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is the story of a female "artificial person", the eponymous Friday, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans. Artificial humans are widely resented, and much of the story deals with Friday's struggle both against prejudice and to conceal her enhanced attributes from other humans. The story is set in a Balkanized 21st century, in which the nations of the North American continent have been split up into a number of smaller states.

                • Cover of Darwin
                  Darwin

                  series · 2 books · 1999

                  completed

                  similar bygenetic engineeringnear futurescience fictiontensenorth america

                  Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio imagines a dormant retrovirus in human DNA activating worldwide, triggering an accelerated leap in human evolution that governments respond to as a plague. The 1999 novel won the Nebula Award; its sequel Darwin's Children follows the first generation of changed children as society decides what to do with them. Together they're speculative near-future science fiction grounded in genetics rather than space opera.

                • Cover of Snow Crash
                  Snow Crash

                  Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 1992

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                  Snow Crash is a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.

                • Cover of Alif the Unseen
                  Alif the Unseen

                  G. Willow Wilson · standalone novel · 2012

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                  Alif the Unseen is a 2012 cyberpunk fantasy novel by American writer G. Willow Wilson. In the novel, a Middle Eastern hacker named Alif discovers a book of djinn tales which may lead to a new age of quantum computing. The novel won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of Gun, with Occasional Music
                  Gun, with Occasional Music

                  Jonathan Lethem · standalone novel · 1994

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                  Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea.) He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love a little with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse. (adapted from the blurb accompanying the first edition)

                • Cover of Have Space Suit - Will Travel
                  Have Space Suit - Will Travel

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1958

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                  From the back cover of the Del Rey 9th printing: "Skyjacked - Everything happened at once. One minute Kip Russell was walking about in his own backyard, testing out an old space suit and dreaming about going to the moon - and the next he was out cold and the captive of an insidious space pirate. The whole thing seemed like a very bad dream until he discovered he wasn't the only prisoner on board. Then the reality of the situation became inescapable. He - along with the daughter of a world-renowned scientist and a beautiful creature from an alien planet - had been skyjacked by a monstrous extraterrestrial and they were on their way to the Moon... a journey toward a fate worse than death!"

                • Cover of When She Woke
                  When She Woke

                  Hillary Jordan · standalone novel · 2011

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                  When She Woke is a science fiction novel by American author Hillary Jordan, published in October 2011. It has been translated into French, Spanish, Turkish, German, Portuguese and Chinese. The novel is a dystopian reimagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, set in a future theocratic America where rather than being imprisoned and rehabilitated, criminals are punished by being "chromed" – having their skin color genetically altered to fit their crime – and released into the general population to survive as best they can.

                • Cover of A Fall of Moondust
                  A Fall of Moondust

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1961

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                  From the back cover of the Harbrace paperback: "The action of A Fall of Moondust takes place almost a century from now when tours on the moon are a common occurrence. One of the high points of each tour is a cruise around the Sea of Thirst, a body of volcanic dust, in a specially designed vessel called the Selene On a perfectly routine voyage one day the Selene suddenly disappears. How do you locate a small tourist "cruiser" buried beneath fifty feet of dust? If you find it, how do you rescue the passengers and crew? If you are on board, how do you feel and what do you do while brave men and expert technicians join forces in a race against time? Sustained excitement, lively humor, and an engaging cast of characters make this one of Arthur C. Clarke's most intriguing novels."

                • Cover of Heavy Weather
                  Heavy Weather

                  Bruce Sterling · standalone novel · 1994

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                  Set in 2031 when global climatology has significantly changed the world's weather patterns, Jane Unger "rescues" her brother Alex from a Mexican clinic and takes him to the Storm Troupe. The troupe, under the leadership of Dr. Jerry Mulcahey, chases tornadoes primarily across northern Texas, gathering data in preparation for tracking the mythical F-6 tornado.

                • Cover of Artemis
                  Artemis

                  Andy Weir · standalone novel · 2017

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                  Artemis is a 2017 science fiction novel by American writer Andy Weir. It takes place in the late 2080s in Artemis, the first and only city on the Moon. It follows the life of porter and smuggler Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara as she gets caught up in a conspiracy for control of the city. The book received mixed reviews from critics.

                • Cover of The Windup Universe
                  The Windup Universe

                  series · 3 books · 2005

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                • Cover of Unwind Dystology
                  Unwind Dystology

                  series · 5 books · 2007

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                  Neal Shusterman's Unwind Dystology opens in a United States reshaped by the resolution to a war over reproductive rights: parents can retroactively have a teenager "unwound," their body disassembled for transplant on the premise that nothing technically dies since every part lives on in someone else. The first novel follows three teens fleeing that fate, and the sequels widen the same dystopia's cast and consequences across a four-book arc plus companion material. It is grim speculative fiction built to ask hard bioethical questions rather than offer comfort.

                • Cover of Ill Wind
                  Ill Wind

                  Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason · standalone novel · 1995

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                  From the flaps of the Forge first printing: "A supertanker has crashed off the shores of San Francisco, producing the largest oil spill in history. Desperate to avert an ecological - and public relations - disaster, a multinational oil company releases an untested virus designed to break up the spill. A virus that spreads like wildfire on the wind, destroying anything made of petroleum - destroying gasoline in automobile tanks, plastics, nylon, the very fabric of modern civilization itself. Dr. Spencer Lockwood, one of the few scientists to recognize the danger, tries to alert government and industry to the impending danger. But his warnings go unheeded and the devastation mounts. As America descends into savagery, Lockwood forges a courageous band of scientists to carry out a daring plan to restore order. But humanity's last hope my be snuffed out by a ruthless general driven by an insatiable desire for power. A riveting and inspiring saga of ecological catastrophe and human survival, Ill Wind is all the more frightening because it could actually happen. Kevin Anderson, a technical consultant for the Air Force, and Doug Beason, a former science advisor o the Reagan administration, have drawn upon the latest breakthroughs in biotechnology to create a disaster scenario that is terrifying in its plausibility."

                • Cover of Reckoners
                  Reckoners

                  series · 6 books · 2013

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                  The Reckoners is a series of young adult superhero novels written by American author Brandon Sanderson. The series consists of Steelheart (2013), Firefight (2015), Calamity (2016) and Lux (2021). The series depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which the appearance of an orbiting cosmic phenomenon known as Calamity has given random people superhuman powers in apparent defiance of known physical laws, turning them into "Epics". These Epics prey upon or enslave the rest of humanity, causing the collapse of traditional governments. One young man orphaned by a High Epic joins a group that is killing Epics.

                • Cover of Oath of Fealty
                  Oath of Fealty

                  Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle · standalone novel · 1981

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                  Oath of Fealty is a 1981 novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, published originally by Phantasia Press, then by Timescape Books, with numerous reprints. Set in the near future, it involves an arcology, a large inhabited structure, called Todos Santos, which rises above a crime-ridden Los Angeles, California, but has little beyond casual contact with the city. The novel popularized the phrase "think of it as evolution in action", which occurs elsewhere in Niven's books. The novel anticipated the building of the Los Angeles subway. It was included in David Pringle's book Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.

                • Cover of The Shockwave Rider
                  The Shockwave Rider

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1975

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                  The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool, perhaps derived from the RAND Corporation's Delphi method – a prediction market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA's controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.

                • Cover of The Thousandth Floor
                  The Thousandth Floor

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                  Katharine McGee's trilogy imagines Manhattan in 2118 as a single thousand-story tower housing every stratum of society, following five teenagers whose ambitions collide as they climb toward, or fall from, its highest floors. Across The Thousandth Floor, The Dazzling Heights, and The Towering Sky, addiction, surveillance, genetic privilege, and family betrayal play out as soap-opera drama in a meticulously built near-future setting.

                • Cover of Watchers
                  Watchers

                  Dean R. Koontz · standalone novel · 1987

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                  This probably qualifies as a science-based adventure rather than a science fiction novel. The premise, and only speculative fiction element, is that a U.S. government funded laboratory creates a golden retriever that's as intelligent as a human for use in intelligence gathering and also creates a monkey hybrid that's intended for a military police dog role and as a killing machine on battlefields. The animals escape and the story plays out as a straight adventure novel with a good chunk of romance thrown in.

                • Cover of Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

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                  The Sprawl Trilogy is William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk sequence: Neuromancer (1984), in which hacker Case is drawn into a high-stakes heist alongside an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which widen the same near-future world of corporate power and networked cyberspace to new characters. Johnny Mnemonic, an early short story set in the same fictional milieu, predates the novels and introduces the courier Molly Millions before her role in the trilogy. Together these works established much of cyberpunk's visual and thematic vocabulary.

                • Cover of Upgrade
                  Upgrade

                  Blake Crouch · standalone novel · 2022

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                  Upgrade is a 2022 novel by Blake Crouch. It is his tenth stand-alone novel, published three years after Summer Frost (2019). The novel explores the ethical and existential ramifications of genetic engineering, set in a near-future world where humanity grapples with the consequences of advanced human genetic enhancement.

                • Cover of The Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

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                  The Handmaid's Tale is Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel set in Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that has overthrown the United States and forces fertile women into reproductive servitude as Handmaids; it is narrated by one such woman, Offred. Atwood returned to the world in her 2019 sequel The Testaments, set fifteen years later and narrated by three women, including the regime's Aunt Lydia. Together the two novels move from Gilead's grip on power toward the first cracks in it.

                • Cover of The Door Into Summer
                  The Door Into Summer

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1957

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                  From the first page of the Signet 6th printing: "An electronics engineer invents a wizard robot... only to find himself shanghaied by his ruthless partner and his gold-digging fiancee. The crafty pair forces him to submit to the "long sleep" - suspended animation for thirty years. But when he wakes up in the year 2000 A.D. the inventor makes a startling discovery. He learns that it is possible now to twist time forwards or backwards. And so he returns to the past bent on a mission... of revenge."

                • Cover of Demons
                  Demons

                  John Shirley · standalone novel · 2002

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                  Writers from Clive Barker to Bruce Sterling and Roger Zelazny have praised John Shirley's searing, apocalyptic visions of postmodern hell on earth. Now this perversely brilliant author, one of the seminal representatives on the cyberpunk movement, unleashes his newest masterpiece.DEMONSIn a future uncomfortably close to the present day, the apocalypse has surpassed all expectations. Hideous demons roam the streets in an orgy of terror, drawing pleasure from torturing humans as sadistically as possible. Divided into seven clans, these grisly invaders--gnashing, writhing, bloodthirsty monsters--seem horrifically to belong in our world.Ira, a young San Francisco artist, becomes involved with a strange group of scientists and philosophers desperately trying to end the bloody siege. Yet through it all, Ira continues to paint--for in his canvasses lie crucial clues to the demons' origins.Yet the demons draw their strength from an all-too-familiar evil--a deadly malevolence supported by some of the greatest powers on earth, concealed beneath the trappings of status, success, and abused power. Ira and his allies-- including a compelling young seeress--come to believe these demons didn't just appear. They were summoned. But the most shocking revelation is yet to come . . .EXCLUSIVE TO THIS EDITION: The original novella Demons was published as an acclaimed, limited edition hardcover which Publishers Weekly called a "mini-masterpiece." Now the terror continues, as the sequel story, "Undercurrents," takes the reader on a macabre journey into the center of the conspiracy that may lay waste to the Earth. From the Hardcover edition.

                • Cover of Ready Player One
                  Ready Player One

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                  Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011) is set in a near-future dystopia where much of humanity escapes into the OASIS, a vast virtual-reality universe, and follows teenager Wade Watts as he chases an Easter egg hidden by the OASIS's late creator in a puzzle-based hunt worth a fortune. The 2020 sequel, Ready Player Two, picks up after Wade has gained control of the OASIS and follows him and his friends into a new quest built around a brain-computer interface the creator left behind.