Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline’s novels include Ready Player One and the follow-up, Armada.

From his Q & A with Jacob Brogan for Slate:

What role do video games play in our lives today?

Human beings are not wired to live the way we live now. We’ve only been living in cities and driving cars and working in cubicles for a few hundred years. Millions of years of evolution have us wired to hunt and gather and form teams and kick ass and conquer territory and be explorers.

That’s the natural human thing, but we don’t get to do that any more, which is why modern life drives a lot of people crazy. We have to work out that hunter-gatherer energy by other means. Some people do it with sports, but I think an even larger group of people does it with video games.

In some ways what you’re suggesting is that video games are more natural than real life.

We’ve mastered nature now. We exist outside nature. Our food can just be packaged and brought to us. We exist in the womb of technology from the time that we’re born, protected by modern medicine, which is...[read on]

Learn about Ernest Cline’s ten favorite science fiction novels.

--Marshal Zeringue