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Assuming of course that for some reason high school curriculum shifts dramatically to include the importance of all things related to 80s pop-culture. Ready Player One could easily be at the top of the summer reading list for future students of classes like “80s Geek Culture 101,” “Introduction to Video Games: Arkanoid to Zaxxon,” or  “Understanding Your Parents Nostalgia”. However, nobody who’s a teenager actually cares about the 80s and if they do, it’s in an ironic way that actually has little to no reverence or appreciation for the decade that spawned (or at the very least nursed to life) video games, electronic music, personal computers and the internet. A man with a great deal of reverence and appreciate for that decade, however, is Ernest Cline.

(I know that in last week’s episode of 9ES I said I was going to talk about Roger Corman’s Gas-s-s-s, however it seems like that eventual column is going to take a lot more research and investigation that I thought, so we’ll deal with that later).

If you haven’t heard or heard of Ernest Cline yet, you should probably do that now (I am particularly fond of his spoken word on Airwolf, it’s a good place to start if you’re trying to decide whether or not you’ll enjoy a book like Ready Player One). If you couldn’t tell from his website, Cline is obsessed (or at the very least extremely “into”) the 80s. It should not be a surprise that his first book is largely about his favorite things from that time period.  ↓ Read the rest of this entry…