There's a long-running line of children's books where you provide the kid's details – name, age, favourite hobbies – and they all get mail-merged into the narrative, making the youngster the central character in their own story and providing the illusion of personalisation at a low cost. Ready Player Two, the sequel to the hugely popular Ready Player One, offers a similar experience. 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. The action picks up immediately after the events of Ready Player One, which is set in the near-future, in a world where vast swathes of the population spend most of their day living inside a virtual reality simulation called the OASIS, to escape from the poverty, crime and general awfulness of life on Earth. The protagonist, Wade Watts, is a nerdy teenager living in the'stacks' outside Oklahoma City – a shanty-town comprised of literal stacks of trailers and RVs – who devotes all of his time to an in-OASIS treasure hunt devised by billionaire James Halliday, the late co-creator of the simulation, as a Willy Wonka-esque means to find an heir to his fortune.

All you writers, authors and creative writing types who may be worrying about AI, rest easy, you're safe. So, in this article, there are no juicy bits of code or scripts to get all hot under the collar about. This whole episode started out with a couple of questions. Could AI write a novel or a novella of a quality that it could be entered into a writing competition? Is it possible to make 50 Shades of Grey readable?