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.

I once had a very engaging and amiable debate with Natasha. I wish, I told her, that I could be a real journalist, like you are. She scoffed and said she wished that she could be a blogger, like I am.  The conversation ran the gamut from the importance of legitimacy to the actual relevance of print media and the future of news reporting. That we could have this conversation for two hours and not pull out knives is probably one of the reasons we’re a couple.

At any rate, I’ve always longed for the kind of legitimacy that I imagine print columnists have. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. Or at least I wasn’t until I read this snippet from GQ’s profile of Chris Evans:

“He is the greatest person I’ve ever met in my life, which is what I told him I’d say in this article if he gave me back the leather jacket I accidentally left at his house, and he did.”

Fuck it, print is dead.

The first installment of Must Love Dice is up on Alert Nerd right now.

(I apologize, by the way, for the pink overload you’re probably seeing right now, between the new look of the blog and the abundance of pink on the cover image)

You might be thinking, “Jeff, haven’t I read this before?” Well, kind of. The first version of the first few thousand words of this story appeared in issue #4 of Grok back in June 2009. From there, the story, which was always supposed to be a serial, stalled. Circumstances conspired to make me a) change the second installment to a one-off flashback and b) abandon it completely because I could not hit the deadline anyway and because I didn’t think it was doing what I wanted it to.

When Alert Nerd changed formats to focus exclusively on fiction and creative non-fiction, I my intention was always to come back to MLD. Before I got to it, though, the concept for “Peasant Problem” hit me and I ran with it.

If you’re so inclined, check it out. I’ve done some heavy, heavy editing and I think that it’s benefited from it. I know that I have – like most writers will tell you, editing yourself is both alien and a huge pain in the ass.  Enjoy it. New installments will come bi-weekly on Mondays.

Hey, blog. It’s been awhile, huh?  How’ve you been?

I’m good, I’m good.  I’ve been spending a decent amount of time trying to muddle through NaNoWriMo this month (which I might share some excerpts from), as well as working on this:

“Peasant Problem” is a short story that I’m releasing serially over at Alert Nerd. It’s a political thriller that takes place at a LARP (live-action role-playing) event.

I have a fair number of friends who play at these things; I simultaneously don’t see the appeal and find myself sucked into the fractious and Machiavellian nature of the drama perpetuated by the players (not their characters).  The title refers to the kind of inherent sociological issue with the hobby – that nobody wants to be ‘just a peasant’ in a collaborative storytelling environment and instead all want to be the main protagonist in their own narratives.

If you are unfamiliar with the hobby, I urge you to take a few minutes and watch this:

You can read the story by clicking on the image above. I think it isn’t awful.

I talk about the Solomon Kane movie over at Bloody Good Horror.

And of course, I review comics with some of my friends at Floppytown.  Today, for instance, I say, “Darkseid’s revenge for Batman shooting him with a god-killing time bullet is to turn Batman into a time bullet that will destroy the universe and that is why comics are beautiful.”

But the real good news is that “3AM, Banshee,” my nonfiction account of a real-life ghost hunting experience, is now live at Alert Nerd and part two will drop next Monday morning.

At Comic Con, I got to talk a bit with Peter V. Brett, whose novel The Warded Man I enjoyed a great deal because it is a well-paced mashup of fantasy and horror that is actually effective at the horror half that exhibits some excellent world-building on the level of Scott Lynch or Greg Keyes.  I mentioned this to him and told him that the lack of a unified setting is one thing that kills my suspension of disbelief immediately, confiding that that was my major problem with a certain trilogy of well-liked fantasy novels that I will not name, remarking that the whole thing felt too much like a transcription of a high school Dungeons and Dragons game.

Brett said, “I wrote a novel about my D&D game once; I’ve never attempted to sell it for exactly that reason.”

That’s some food for thought for me on a number of different levels, I think. Not to mention that this is the third or fourth piece of very solid creative advice I’ve gotten from creators at cons.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

- Willa Cather

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We’ll look back one day and realize it ruined everything.

When I first heard about PPZ, I wanted to lobby the state legislature to change laws so that I could marry the thing. I love Jane Austen, and I love zombies.  What, I ask you, could be better?

How, I wondered, could it be bad?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is bad, though.  It’s a nitpick that I’ve had before and I may be one of the only people picking this particular nit, but I wish that Seth Graeme-Smith had played it just a little straighter or been a bit more proficient (compared to ‘not at all proficient’) in writing to mimic Austen’s tone and language.  The finished product reads like a clumsy The Princess Bride, with a classic text being editorialized on by a modern voice.  Of course, William Goldman was writing the entire thing and not just appending nonsense references to Zatoichi into an existing Regency romance.  But even still, there’s something powerful about the idea of mashing up classic literature with modern-day supernatural elements, all born out of the kind of ‘ninja viking samurai spy cop movie star who is also a dinosaur’ zeitgeist that kind of captivates geeks of late.

So PPZ may not be great, but it is immensely popular, which is more important.  You might be wondering, “How can I get my piece of that pie?”  Well, I have a few mathematical (dare I say mathemagical) formulas that will point you in the right direction.  Behold:

(FICTIONAL CHARACTER or HISTORICAL FIGURE) + (SUPERNATURAL ORIGINS) = $$$$$

The example I came up with when joking about this on Twitter this morning was “SCARLETT O’HARA is a LEPRECHAUN.” But some other good ones include:

What if FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER was a VAMPIRE?

Did you know that JACK LONDON was a WEREWOLF? This is a particularly good one because London often wrote about wolves (knowing over a century before the advent of the Three Wolf Moon shirt the mystic power that lupines emanate) and there is also a lazy Warren Zevon reference ripe for the plucking.

What if FRANK SINATRA were actually the Aztec god of drunkenness TEZCATZONTECATL?  The best is yet to come indeed.

Advanced Equation:

{TWILIGHT – vampires + (SUPERNATURAL ORIGIN) / (CLASSIC LOVE STORY) x (POPULAR CULTURE)} + ZOMBIES and/or A POST-APOCALYPTIC SETTING = OMGSUCCESS

“So, it’s like Twilight – except there are mummies instead of vampires – by way of Sister Carrie and the characters are all on Jersey Shore when the zombie apocalypse happens.”

Now you try!

Tomorrow, I won’t be thirty anymore.

I’ll be thirty-one.  I’ll be in my thirties.  And as any impending birthday is wont to do, it has made me introspective.

I dreaded thirty as it approached, but thirty became a good year.  It was thirty – it was important because it had a zero at the end, right?  I think that emboldened me and gave me new perspective at the same time. With that bolstering, I managed to extricate myself from a failing relationship and grant myself the closest thing to a fresh start that I could manage. I’ve reconnected with some friends who fell by the wayside during my married years, and the quick forgiveness for my disappearance and quicker reintegration into their social sphere was frankly heartwarming. Though it may not seem it from the outside, the biggest change has been a creative one.  I’ve published the first part of a serial novella this year.  I’ve gained some momentum on the first comics project that I’ve been collaborating on, started scripting two others, and have managed to connect with a few artists who seem enthused about what Matt and I have been putting down on paper.  There have been sketches.  In my inbox.*  That such a thing can happen excites the hell out of me to what I think is the perpetual amusement of the artist in question. I got involved with Alert Nerd in an official capacity, which I don’t think would have happened if I weren’t doing something that was worthwhile, friendship with Matt and Sarah and Chris aside.

I’ve felt, in the past year, like shit has been happening.  That’s not something I can say about every year of the last decade.  I’ve felt, in the past year, genuinely happy, which is also not something I can say about every year of the last decade.

Many of you reading are people that fall into my personal orbit, which is my overwrought Jeff way of saying that we’re friends.  There have been times in the past year that I’ve leaned on you when I’ve needed it and you’ve always been there.  I’m demanding in that regard, I know, which means I doubly appreciate that you do it. I’m also bad at expressing that because of my sarcastic veneer.  So thank you, all of you – from the people that I’ve grown up with to the people that I only know via Twitter and, hell, even the people who find this site by searching for “Cobra Commander Weather Schemes.” Thirty’s been a good year, and it’s due to each of you.

Here’s to thirty-one.

*sadly, none of them involve space werewolves.