{"id":396,"date":"2018-01-08T20:03:24","date_gmt":"2018-01-09T02:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lfs.org\/blog\/?p=396"},"modified":"2023-07-28T10:59:39","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T15:59:39","slug":"prometheus-winner-ready-player-one-out-soon-as-a-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/prometheus-winner-ready-player-one-out-soon-as-a-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Prometheus winner ‘Ready Player One’ divides opinion, but will be out soon as a movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ready Player One<\/em><\/a> by Ernest Cline, the 2012 Prometheus Award winner<\/a> (in a tie, with Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze<\/em>)<\/a> is about to become much better known. A movie version, directed by Steven Spielberg, will be released March 30.<\/a><\/p>\n

Not everyone has climbed on Ernest Cline’s bandwagon.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ernest Cline (Creative Commons license. Photo by Gage Skidmore)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Second Opinion: Ready Player One is the Worst Thing Nerd Culture Ever Produced,” published last year and written by I. Coleman, tries its best to live up to the title. Sample paragraph:<\/p>\n

“Ready Player One<\/em> is a 2011 novel that lifts its setting, premise, and most of its story beats from 1992\u2019s Snow Crash<\/em>, removes all of the self-awareness, badass action, and philosophical musings on the nature of the relationship between language and technology, replaces them with painfully awkward 80s references, and changes the main character from a samurai pizza deliveryman and freelance hacker to the asshole kid in your friend group who claimed he ‘didn\u2019t need showers,’ vomited onto the page by Ernest Cline. Its bestseller success and Cline\u2019s subsequent 7-figure sale of the screenplay to Steven Spielberg is as close as we can get to objective proof that the meritocracy isn\u2019t working.”<\/p>\n

More here.<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve noticed other folks on social media who are scornful of the book. Disclosure: I enjoyed reading it..<\/p>\n

I wasn’t the only one. Reviewing the book for the Boing Boing website<\/a>, Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder wrote,<\/p>\n

“It seems like every decade or so a science fiction novel comes along that sends a lightning bolt through my nervous system: Philip Jose Farmer\u2019s To Your Scattered Bodies Go<\/em> (1971). William Gibson\u2019s Neuromancer<\/em> (1984). Neal Stephenson\u2019s Snow Crash<\/em> (1992). Cory Doctorow\u2019s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom<\/em> (2003). And I recently discovered what my mind-blowing novel for the 2010s is: Ernest Cline\u2019s Ready Player One.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

Just in case you couldn’t tell if he liked it, Frauenfelder later adds, that the book is\u00a0 “a rollicking, surprise-laden, potboiling, thrilling adventure story that takes place both in the OASIS and the real world. It is loaded with geek-culture references from the 1980s that resonated strongly with me \u2014 but they are all integral to the story and never feel gratuitous. You don\u2019t need to know about 1980s pop culture to appreciate the story. I loved every sentence of this book, and was a little sad when I reached the end and re-entered reality.”<\/p>\n

— Tom Jackson<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE:
\n<\/strong>
\n<\/u><\/strong>* Prometheus winners:\u00a0<\/strong>For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees \u2013 for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards \u2013 visit the enhanced\u00a0Prometheus Awards page\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to the full set of published appreciation-reviews of past winners.<\/p>\n

* Read\u00a0\u201cThe Libertarian History of Science Fiction,\u201d<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0an essay in the international magazine\u00a0Quillette<\/em>\u00a0that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf\/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0Watch\u00a0 <\/strong>videos <\/strong>of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog\u2019s\u00a0Video page.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

*\u00a0Join us<\/strong>! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards,\u00a0join\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf\/fantasy fans.<\/p>\n

Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital, and in some ways even more powerful than politics in the long run, by sparking innovation, better ideas, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other\u2019s rights and differences.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, the 2012 Prometheus Award winner (in a tie, with Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze) is about to become much better known. A movie version, directed by Steven Spielberg, will be released March 30. Not everyone has climbed on Ernest Cline’s bandwagon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,1585,41,10],"tags":[445,447,2029],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-awards-news","category-fiction-in-the-news","category-movies","category-news","tag-ernest-cline","tag-ready-player-one","tag-steven-spielberg"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pe8nGl-6o","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6072,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions\/6072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lfs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}