Yesterday, I talked about Ernest Cline’s new novel, Ready Player One. I also had the opportunity to talk to the author about the book. I really appreciate his insights, though we will forever disagree about Krull (which I have not actually seen since I was six years old).

—–

Jeff Stolarcyk: Hi Ernest. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Before we get started, I’d like to say that I loved the book; the last time I devoured a book so quickly, the word ‘Hallows’ was on the cover.

One of the running jokes throughout Ready Player One is a debate on the quality of Ladyhawke. This begs the question: whither Krull?

Ernest Cline: First, thank you for that huge compliment! I’m so glad you enjoyed the book.

As for Krull… it’s referenced on page 42. During the first debate about Ladyhawke, in fact. I’m sorry to say, it’s mentioned disparagingly. For me, Krull starts out bad, then it briefly crosses the border into so-bad-it’s-good territory, then it circles back around and drops anchor right in the middle of total crap town. Amazing production design, lame story. However, I did love the Krull arcade game. The Atari 2600 version was awesome, too. Also, I will concede that the Glaive was an extremely bad ass weapon (one I may have stolen for my high school AD&D character.)

JS: Geek culture has a unique, reference-driven patois that you capture pretty perfectly in the book, part Restoration-comedy-style capping and part symbology. I’d call it a kind of ‘Darmok’ language, but that in and of itself is a prime example of what I’m talking about. Did you worry at all about the accessibility of the book to non-geeks?

EC: Not really. I think you’re right – geek speak is sort of a symbolic, allegorical language, and that allows people to follow it. Even if they don’t get the exact reference, they can still infer your general meaning, just from the context. When I run across a reference to something unfamiliar in a book or movie, I usually just skim right over it. But sometimes I’ll go look it up online, if I’m really curious to understand its full meaning. Although, some early readers have told me they read my book with Wikipedia open, because they wanted to understand every single reference, because how the references relate directly to the story. I take that as a huge compliment.

I hope that the pop culture references in my book read like those moments when Indiana Jones starts referencing some ancient myth we’ve never heard of and don’t fully understand. We still get the general idea of what he’s talking about, while the story keeps right on moving.

JS: The major conflict of the Egg Hunt, the High Five versus IOI’s Sixers, seems like it’s emblematic of game development’s evolution from Adventure, which was just one guy, to something like L.A. Noire with its exhausting credits scroll and the new round of debate over devs’ working conditions in that corporate atmosphere. What do you think is the je ne sais quois that an indie game like Octodad or Sword & Sworcery has over, let’s say, a Modern Warfare?

EC: Well, I’ve never been a game developer, but I’m guessing that indie game design is similar to indie filmmaking. When you’re creating something out of love, and you don’t have to please anyone but yourself, that’s an environment where you can create something really unique and maybe even ground breaking. When you’re creating something for mass consumption, because you’re being paid to, and you take notes notes from a large corporation every step of the way, that’s an environment conducive to creating something big, loud, lame and forgettable. But sometimes we see amazing games/movies emerge from that environment, too, but it seems far more rare.

JS: Last winter, Harry Knowles, who is a friend of yours, touted Ready Player One as the kind of fandom apotheosis that Patton Oswalt called for in his now-infamous Wired column. Patton argues that a lack of scarcity is diluting our cultural identity, and I noticed that that’s something you pay a little attention to in Ready Player One. Do you think that the instant knowledge base that the proliferation of wikis, smartphones and the like empower us with is ultimately bad for us, from a critical thinking perspective?

EC: Patton is a genius, but I disagree with him on that point. Saying that “a lack of scarcity is diluting our cultural identity” is really just another way of saying “kids today have it too damn easy!”  And I’ve expressed that very same sentiment myself. But I also believe that knowledge is a good thing, and that the more knowledge we have, the better. And that definitely includes having constant access to every book, movie, TV show, cartoon, song, and piece of artwork that has ever been created.

In his Wired essay, Patton (half-jokingly) argued that this kind of unlimited access creates “weak otakus” – geeks who don’t appreciate anything, because they have unlimited access to everything. That’s where I think we seem to have a difference of opinion.

Patton, Harry, and I are all part of the first generation of film geeks to have access to a massive library of movies, thanks to advent of VCRs when we were very young. Because we grew up with access to thousands of flicks, did we appreciate them any less than we should have? I don’t believe I did. And I know Harry didn’t – that guy had access to a huge 16mm film archive at birth, and it made him the geek he is today.  I think all of that additional access to media and minutiae was good for us. We had a lot more material to inspire us while we were growing up. And I think it’ll be the same for the kids of the future, who will grow up with free access to “Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever.”  They’ll take it all in just like we did, zero in on the stuff they think is the coolest, and that will inspire them to create their own unique type of music, art, movie, or book. And it will be inspired by everything that has come before, and that’s what makes for great art. So says I.

JS: The ‘real world’ of Ready Player One is a pretty stark contrast to the Oasis, and so much of it seems scarily plausible. When you were writing, did you have any idea just how prescient the dystopia that you created would end up being? Re-reading the book as the debt ceiling brinksmanship was going on was kind of chilling.

EC: I wrote the book in decade following of 9/11, while Bush was in office and we were fighting two wars. Peak Oil and Global Warming were starting to loom large on the horizon.  So things already seemed pretty Dystopian. I just tried to extrapolate where current events might lead us in thirty years, if things continue to get steadily worse.

But I also try to remain optimistic about the future. You can never rule out human ingenuity. We have the unique ability to invent/discover amazing stuff that can change everything, right when our collective backs are to the wall.

JS: I know you recently worked on a few drafts of a screenplay for Ready Player One. What is the toughest part of adapting your own work, and conversely, the most rewarding part?

EC: The week after I handed in my final revision of the novel, I had to start writing on the screenplay, which felt like starting over at the beginning. The toughest part was making so many changes to the story, and having to leave so many other things out. Novels are structured and paced differently than movies, and you can do things in a novel that you can’t do in a movie – at least, not with paying millions of dollars in rights clearances.

I think the most rewarding part of writing the screenplay was working for Warner Bros., after growing up watching the studio’s movies and cartoons. There is nothing cooler than driving onto the Warner Bros. lot, passing that water tower where the Animaniacs live, and then realizing that you’re there for work. That was a dream come true.

JS: What’s next for you? After poetry, screenwriting and prose, what is your next frontier? Have you thought about trying comics?

EC: I would love to work on a comic book. And a video game. I’d like to try my hand at every geek vocation possible.
I’m currently working on a screenplay for a small movie that I want to direct. Once that’s finished, I might start on the next book. Or join a Ninja Academy. I’m still undecided.

JS: The Oasis seems to borrow elements from a lot of sources, but the general player community feels influenced by EVE Online. Can you tell me a little about your own personal experiences with the MMO genre? Did you have any specific games in mind as you were writing?

EC: My history with MMOs dates all the way back to text-based MUDs. I loved Ultima Online, but when EverQuest came out I became totally addicted for a few months. That was when I had to quit MMOs cold turkey – out of self-preservation. I tried Anarchy Online a few years later, but just to see how a sci-fi MMO was done.

I didn’t have any specific game in mind when I created the OASIS. I was just trying to envision to coolest possible evolution of the Internet, like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but on a much grander scale, with elements of various video games and social networking sites thrown in.

JS: As a parent, do you every worry about how your child is going to respond to all your geekery? Are you afraid of rejection?

EC: My kid has nerd DNA on both sides, and at age three she’s already obsessed with Ultraman and Spectreman. I think I’m safe from her rejecting my geek nature. (But for how long?)

JS: Finally, do you still find the time to game, either tabletop or videogames? If so, what are you into right now?

EC: I still play Dungeons and Dragons whenever I’m back home in Ohio visiting my high school gaming pals. I’m actually going to GenCon with those guys later this week, and we’re going to run our classic “Highlander meets the Forgotten Realms” module there. It should be epic.

As for video games, I really love Valve’s stuff, especially Half-Life 2 and both Portal games. Left For Dead 2 is good for my soul. And I feed my Most Dangerous Game FPS addiction by logging on to Quakelive. But most of all, I love to fire up MAME and play one of the classics from my youth. Right now, I think I’ll go see if I can still beat Heavy Barrel on one credit.

—–

Ready Player One comes out on August 16. You can preorder it now on Amazon.com. You can read more about the author at his website and follow him on Twitter.

Note: A copy of Ready Player One was provided to the author for review.

The past decade has been the Age of the Geek – studios pander to the Comic-Con crowd, Internet buzz can destroy a movie’s opening weekend and nostalgia drives marketing. For every dyed-in-the-wool geek creator or personality, there’s at least two or three willing to take glamour shots of themselves licking a PlayStation while wearing a Red Lantern ring at a Jonathan Coulton concert. It’s easy to be skeptical of anything that tries to label itself ‘for nerds’ or ‘for geeks’ – those of us with long memories still remember when those words were pejoratives.  Too often the stuff they produce ‘for’ us is awash in high concepts, strained pop culture references and hyperactivity, none of which is anchored to a real story or real characters.

It’s easy to be burned by ‘entertainment for nerds’ and the real thing deserves to be lauded when it comes along.

Part Willy Wonka, part Say Anything… and part The Keep On the Borderlands, Ernest Cline‘s debut novel Ready Player One is an addictive mashup of nostalgia-powered science fiction, pulpy quest narrative and high-school coming of age narrative that transcends the mishmash of its parts. The subject matter is something that Cline, the screenwriter of 2009′s much-loved film Fanboys, knows something about, but can his first novel live up to his screenwriting? The answer is yes: Ready Player One is a fun, endearing debut novel.

Wade Watts lives in a near-future world gone to hell, where the class divide is a wide, bottomless chasm and megacorporations literally own their employees. To escape his dystopian trailer-park reality, he spends his time in The Oasis, an immersive, persistent massively multiplayer online environment used by most of the world’s population. In his free time, he’s a Gunter – part of an online subculture of hackers and gamers looking Halliday’s Easter Egg, the final bequest of The Oasis’s creator James Halliday. The first one to find the Egg stands to win billions of dollars and control over the future of The Oasis itself. Also in the hunt are Wade’s virtual best friend Aech, Art3mis, the girl of his dreams, and the corporate-sponsored Sixers, who want to sell the soul of his online world for windfall profits from restrictive microtransactions and subscription fees. The only problem? In the years since Halliday’s death, nobody has even found the first clue to the prize. Nobody until Wade Watts, that is.

A story that spans two worlds, virtual and real, can lead to a sprawling, complicated narrative (Tad Williams’ bloated if occasionally brilliant Otherland series takes a similar concept to Inception-esque heights), but Cline’s narrative is streamlined, straightforward and, with the exception of a few large expository infodumps in the early chapters, as kinetic as an amusement park ride. Most of Wade’s epic quest happens inside The Oasis, so the story never feels bogged down with ‘worlds-within-worlds’ acrobatics. Even the Oasis, despite its seemingly infinite number of in-game worlds, features only a handful of locations as important parts of the Egg Hunt, among them a Dungeons and Dragons module, a Blade Runner planet and a planet-sized vintage arcade among them. For the most part, Cline also eschews focusing overly hard on the technical side of things and spends more time showing us the relationships between the characters and Wade’s transition into adulthood. Grounding the story in online relationships is a move that makes Wade and Aech and Art3mis instantly more relatable. We aren’t living in their world, but we probably understand the nuances of having Internet friendships and romances.

Ready Player One reads like nothing quite as much as it does a John Hughes or early Cameron Crowe movie, the ones about charming outsider kids finding their dare-to-be-great moments. That’s no mistake, as Halliday’s quest – and Wade’s – is rooted in 80s nostalgia.

Beyond the 80s homages built into the plot and structure of the novel, Cline peppers Ready Player One with copious fandom references – from Star Wars to tokusatsu to Firefly and the full gamut in between. A weaker storyteller might try to use these to pander to its target demographic, to establish his bona fides to the audience by way of copious name dropping. Cline, on the other hand, uses each giant robot, each 80s movie quote and each classic video game to establish his characters more than he does himself, especially Halliday – a character who the audience really only knows through his own media consumption.

There are some clunky passages – Wade’s explanation of virtual public schools is a good example – but they tend to be a necessary evil of starting in media res in a futuristic setting. Cline’s dialogue, on the other hand, is as glib and snappy as a dialogue between impassioned nerds should be.

Ready Player One is compelling nerd literature and one hell of an 8-bit-inspired ride through my generation’s collective childhood. Like all good nerd lit, it remembers that nerds are people, too, and ends up telling a very human story about love, friendship, greed and obsession that anybody can read and love.

Bonus: Tomorrow, come back to read Jeff’s interview with Ready Player One’s author, Ernest Cline!

It’s problematic.

I look at a lot of the things I love in fiction – fantasy, science fiction, superheroes – and I see that that same basic story structure that props each hero’s journey up ultimately tends to be a little fascistic.  Because when Boy X gets Sword Y and learns how to fight from Bygone Hero Z so that he can confront Ultimate Evil Villain W all by himself, there’s a kind of wish-fulfillment tendency to put Boy X in charge of everything, because only he can save us all. If you delve deeply into genre, you see it all over the place; delve too deeply, and you might start thinking it’s the solution to other problems, too – that there’s One Magical Person who should just be able to do what they want and it will save everything (and I’m thinking primarily about political discourse when I say this).  It’s all just ‘I am Right because I have this weapon and I know how to use it.’

I think one of the things that makes the Harry Potter franchise special is that it very pointedly doesn’t do this. It has a propehecied hero, to be sure, and an ultimate villain and some very, very powerful magical baubles and artifacts. To the casual observer, just glancing at the surface of it, it certainly looks like another example of ‘Special Boy’ fiction.

On the contrary, the story of Harry Potter is the story of a normal boy who is faced with exceptional circumstances and rises to them. He achieves victory not because of his powers, but because of his virtues – loyalty, friendship, tenacity, compassion, selflessness, love. He has to rely on his friends and allies to help him win. And ultimately, when he gets that ultimate Elixir, that reward of godlike power, he rejects it. Because he is, after all, a normal boy now become a man.

It is deeply meaningful to me, then, that the “fuck yeah” moments in the finale belong to a housewife and awkward teenage boy who finds a hidden wellspring of fortitude and courage within him when pressed to the extreme. That is exactly where those moments belong.

That story is special. It may have wizards and dragons, but it’s also a rubric by which any person of any age can live their lives happily.

Potter gets compared to Star Wars a lot because of its epic scope and its rabid fandom, but it’s likely not a coincidence that the two stories have the same core narrative. In Return of the Jedi, Luke wins a mystical victory, it’s true, but it means nothing without the military victory of both the fleet and the ground mission on Endor, which itself hinges on the timely intervention of the moon’s native population.

One of the most resonant moments in Star Wars for me is the moment when Luke throws down his lightsaber.* It’s not a gesture of surrender or weakness, but of victory. It demonstrates not only that a real and meaningful victory is not won with weapons or with power alone, and also completes Luke’s arc as a character, his transition from craving instruction on how to fight Vader to realizing that he never needed the weapon to win in the first place.

Over the next few weeks, there will be a lot of talk about what the “next Harry Potter” will be, where it will come from. I think it’s impossible to tell what the next thing to resonate that richly and deeply with such a large audience will be, but I am pretty sure that whatever it ends up being will share the same message at its heart.

*There are myriad reasons why the prequels are not as effective as the originals, but the lack of a true emotional and philosophical echo to this scene is undoubtedly part of what feels ‘off’ to many critics of the prequels.

1. I Swear to Odd
2. Kneel Before Odd
3. Where Is Your Odd Now?
4. Are You There, Odd? It’s Me, Margaret.
5. In the Land of Odd, East of Eden

You know how to reach me, Koontz. Just send a check, please.

I splurged in commemoration of my birth and bought a nook from my local Barnes & Noble.

I’ve had it for four days. As a gadget, it feels good in my hand, is responsive, has a nice minimalistic design and a good user interface and its e-ink screen is incredibly crisp and readable. Because his was the first face to appear on the screensaver as it charged in my bedroom, I named the unit ‘vonnegut’.

It is a very fine gadget.

What I haven’t determined yet is whether or not it’s a gadget that I need.

I love gadgets. I’m not an early adopter and I rarely buy shiny things just to buy shiny things. There’s either an emotional component (like with the Dragon Quest PlayStation 2 controller I’ve got – it looks like a Slime for crying out loud, and what gamer doesn’t love those adorable little guys) or a utility component (a thousand songs in my pocket is pretty useful, even back when I couldn’t play Shining Force on my iPod).

I don’t really feel either of those things when I consider the nook. Why buy one? I keep hearing about how this is future and whatever. I don’t want to be late for the future.

Ultimately, I think the nook is a nice device. But I don’t know that I need it. And I’d say the same for the Kindle (and really, Kindle, crowing that you are smaller than ever is not a selling point for someone with giant ape-hands). It hasn’t saved my life and it hasn’t changed it irrevocably. It’s good at what it does, but what it does doesn’t fill a niche for me.

The main reason why?

I think the best gadget for reading stories in is probably still the book.

Tune in next time on Deadliest Author for…NEAL STEPHENSON vs. DAN BROWN.

I’ve been trying to write about The Passage for awhile, but when I try, I just end up saying “Oh, it’s pretty good,” or something.  It’s an epic book – it spans nearly a century, deals with an apocalyptic event that decimates the U.S. population, and combines eerie supernatural elements with a hard scientific rationale for vampirism. It is a horror story, a survival story and a story about introspection externalized as a physical journey. There is a parallel structure between the modern day story and the future story, and both are inextricably tied together.  It is also a lumbering, laconic tome whose nearly 800 pages are the first part of a trilogy.

The biggest impediment to enjoying The Passage is that the novel itself fools you. The blurb and the first 200 pages tell one story, while the next 500+ deal with something completely unexpected.  This kind of bait and switch walks a fine line between welcome surprise and outright deception and I think it crosses over to deception based on how little of the book is actually what it says it is.

It starts good, gets boring, gets good again at the very end and plays with your goodwill in the middle. Wait for the inevitable movie, which will probably be alright.

Jonathan Maberry’s Marvel Comics event Doomwar won me over so hard that I wanted to check out one of his novels.  I opted for Patient Zero, the first Joe Ledger book (the second, The Dragon Factory, comes out this month), a military thriller about a zombie outbreak.

There is a part of me that enjoys the genre that Patient Zero belongs to a great deal.  I tired of Tom Clancy when I was a teenager, but I’ve still got a yen for Greg Rucka’s excellent Atticus Kodiak books.  Like Kodiak, Ledger’s a battle-hardened badass that’s smarter than he should be and possessed of a heart of gold and the hands of a killer.  At the outset of the book, I worried that Ledger would be one of those action heroes who’s too perfect at everything, but that preconception vanishes pretty early on.  That said, Ledger does end up taking down zombies barehanded; in fact, he does it a lot.  He also solves the villains’ master plan about 3/4 of the way through the book. He’s like the Mara Jade of federal agents, honestly, and the question that you have to ask when approaching Patient Zero is ‘Am I okay with that?’

If you are, Patient Zero is a hell of a ride.  It’s tense, it’s violent and it’s one of those reads that grabs you by the front of the shirt and won’t let go until you finish. It is not the best zombie fiction that’s dropped this decade – that’s still World War Z or Stephen King’s Cell – but it’s a solid action thriller and those are three words that you typically can’t string together.  Definitely recommended.  If you think it’s going to be in your wheelhouse, it probably is.

Ana and Thea, The Book Smugglers, are clearly being blackmailed by me.  Why? Because I’m guest posting on their blog again, this time reviewing a steamy romance novel that I didn’t actually hate.

Oh, and The Utopian, the most emo webcomic written by a grown-ass man, has a plethora of real-world guest appearances in its latest strip, including yours truly (after a liberal application of Just For Men and a weight loss regimen), who’s just chilling out there in the first panel (along with fellow Alert Nerd blogger Sarah).