Ernest Cline Discusses New Novel, Announces DeLorean Giveaway
If you’ve seen Back to the Future more times than you can count, love the films of John Hughes, think New Wave music is still top notch and have dreamed of owning your own DeLorean, Ernest Cline might be your new favorite author.
Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One, is a postmodern tissue of pop culture trivia from the 1980s. Green Apple Books describes it as a nostalgia inducing genre bending virtual reality space opera love story that in Battlestar Galactica fashion melds together fantasy, action-adventure and detective fiction.
Since its release last fall, Ready Player One has garnered numerous accolades from critics who have gushed over Cline’s imaginative panegyric to geek chic set in the future (2044), but rooted in the collective consciousness of the MTV generation. With intertexual references to Blade Runner, authoritarianism and a nod to the dystopian science fiction of the 1980s, some have even gone so far as to describe Ready Player One as the successor to the groundbreaking cyperpunk thriller Neuromancer.
Hidden between the pages of Cline’s latest tome is a secret online web address that will lead zealous sleuths to three online video game challenges–the first challenge being an Atari 2600 game that when beaten provides a clue to unlocking the subsequent challenge and so on.
The first person that completes all three challenges successfully will win a 1982 DeLorean that Cline claims he has transformed into a “time traveling, knight riding, ghost busting, jet car.”
Listen to Ernest Cline discuss Ready Player One in celebration of the paperback release at Green Apple Books in the Granny Smith Room on Friday, June 22 at 7 pm. The sure-to-be coveted DeLorean that Cline will be giving away as part of the contest will allegedly be on display as part of the event.
