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).

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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.

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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!

Sometimes I think about blogging as a medium and I feel like I am not cut out for it. This blog is a record of my life and, really, my life is not entertaining at all.  Seriously not at all, you guys. If I’m going to keep this up, I need to establish goals. Or at least targets.

Other bloggers, they can talk about crazed pets or their small children or that one time when they bought a giant chicken to get revenge on their hateful spouse. Those are compelling topics, and none of them are relevant to my life so I can’t shamelessly steal them.

My day involves a lot of sitting in front of a screen pretending to write. Sometimes I get a paycheck for it, but a lot of the time I am on my own dime and it’s really not very exciting.  I could maybe write about how every time I go to Sonic, nobody at the drive-thru understands what I mean when I order a chocolate Coke, but that shit has to get old after you hear it one or two times; it’s old for me and it happens every time I go to Sonic.

I feel like I don’t know what to tell you, dear reader. Maybe I could tell you that I played Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and that it was pretty good until you get to the end and then it is like uggggh and there is no sense of agency in the denouement of the game which maybe makes sense because you play a Ronnie Magro-looking sci-fi future slave and Ronnie Magro in the present doesn’t have any agency either, because MTV keeps forcing him to reconcile with Sammi even though their relationship is literally Fukushima-Daiichi-level toxic and he’ll probably punch her in the mouth one of these days. I feel like MTV is okay with that as long as they can get a camera on it.

I don’t want to punch much of anything in the mouth, I am currently cat-less, and my girlfriend would probably encourage me to buy a giant metal chicken. Life is good, and that’s a death sentence for the amateur self-insertion observational Internet humorist.

Maybe if I start writing intricate backstories for each of the LEGO figures on my desk….

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling that we seem to share with less and less frequency is wonder.

There is a tension, when it comes to comics, between commercialization and myth.  Superheroes are, as so many people have pointed out so many times, our modern gods.  But they exist inside a medium that has always baldly run itself as a business, not an art or a faith. Every time that the grand myth of comics makes changes that serve the business of things, it breeds a dissonance that turns into dissatisfaction that, in the worst of cases, becomes betrayal. After all, if comics are our mythology, then it is surely just as jarring to discover that creators can’t understand Wonder Woman as it is to learn that God does not answer back. So we manage our expectations, and that’s the bane of wonder. Comics are a medium where we often tout that anything is possible, and that is what wonder is all about.

Captain America is an example of the sort of movie that can be made when you stop forcing concessions from wonder and just tell the story you know the myth deserves. The film watches like a macrocosm of Steve Rogers himself, internally and wholly noble and decent, always the film that its makers want it to be from start to stop without ever being grim and gritty or sexed up. It may not have the flying battle armor or the warring gods of the other Marvel movies, but that character it radiates is just as literally wonderful.

Just a few seats away from us in the theater, a man sat with his two young sons. All three were edge-of-your-seat engaged in the movie from start to stop but the youngest, who looked about six, shouted and whooped and cheered whenever it was appropriate. He was open to it; he didn’t know how to not be. When the Avengers teaser happened, the kid freaked out. That is the way I want to feel. That kid is my hero.

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.

Thanks to Dan, I saw this slightly incomprehensible image today:

It is, of course, a photo of Gandalf, featuring a quote by Yoda, which has been attributed to Albus Dumbledore.  The thing is a trinitarian artifact of nerd blasphemy that defies belief (except that, on the Internet, unbelievability is inversely proportional to its likelihood of existing, which means that this thing has always been a foregone conclusion).

Another Internet friend, writer Chris Walsh, said “I sense a new meme,” and while I know that you can’t force a meme, I can certainly capitalize on someone else’s good idea.

METHODOLOGY: I made a chart, listing these 12 geek sacred cow franchises in varying orders across three columns: Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Batman, the X-Men, the Chronicles of Narnia, His Dark Materials, Transformers and Speed Racer. I then (using a 12-sided die) randomly generated a value for the photo in each of the images, the quote and the character it is attributed to.

(click to giant-size)

I’ve been quite entertained by what Christoper Bird has been doing with Alignment Chart week, and wanted to make one of my own. I thought about re-doing the Glee chart, because it’s severely flawed (Rachel Berry is unabashedly evil), but figured it would be more fun to tackle Leverage, which is a) about to return this Sunday with a new episode and b) is one of my favorite shows on TV.

If you are uncertain what exactly ‘alignment’ is, the Wikipedia article is embarrassingly exhaustive.

Feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

This morning, I’m headed to New York for the 5th annual New York Comic Con.  I probably won’t be online during the days much, so the best place to keep up with me is going to be The Twitter. I’ll also do a Flickr-dump of each day’s photos at night.

I’m planning to take the weekend to chill with friends, most of whom I only see a few times a year, geek out in a safe, non-judging environment and scour Artist’s Alley for collaborators on several projects in various stages of doneness. I’m not really going out in sketch-hunt mode, but I did manage to dig my old sketchbook out of storage and I think my theme, unofficially, is going to be Mr. Miracle and Big Barda.

Soundtrack for the weekend: The War For Infinity by Adam Warrock

Where I’ll be Friday night: at Stitch for the Kirby Krackle show and the GGN Tweetup – look for me there!

Where I’ll be Saturday night: no firm plans yet.

If you want to meet up (to chat, ironically ask me for my autograph, etc) and you can’t find me on the con floor, DM me on Twitter – that’s the best way to get a hold of me during the day as my DMs go right to my phone.

Amazing Spider-Man #640 – I was prematurely set to hate this story with a burning fanboy rage, but last issue threw me for a loop.

Atlas #4 – Sad that this series is ending after #5. But the remaining two issues should be a hell of a ride, and I’m kind of looking forward to this creative team taking over HULK this fall.

Avengers Academy #3 – Christos Gage and Mike McKone are turning in the best Avengers book  currently being published. Accessible to new readers but rewarding for veterans.

Chew #13

Fables #97 – Still thinking I’m going to parachute on this book at #100, but it has time to change my mind.

New Avengers #3 – The second best Avengers book after Avengers Academy.

Secret Avengers #4 – The Avengers book most likely to be dropped by me. Love Brubaker, love the team, can’t get into the book.

The Sixth Gun #3

Thunderbolts #147

Uncanny X-Men #527 – Last issue fills me with hope that this book is on its game again after a long, dark period of crossover events.

Wolverine: Weapon X #16 – An issue, apparently, about Logan fulfilling Nightcrawler’s last wishes. In a perfect universe, this is a story about Professor X and Wolverine battling their way through Germany to plant a tree in the rocky, dead earth. Nobody reading this gets the reference I just made, did they?