Publication Order of Ready Player One Books
| Ready Player One | 2011 |
| Ready Player Two | 2020 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Armada | 2015 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| Bridge to Bat City | 2024 |
About Ernest Cline
Ernest Cline is an American science fiction novelist and screenwriter, born in Ashland, Ohio, in 1972. He is the author of “Ready Player One”, “Armada” and “Ready Player Two”, and he co-wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film of “Ready Player One”.
Cline grew up in Ashland in the 1970s and 1980s, absorbed in video games, films such as “Star Wars” and the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. In his twenties he worked in information technology and wrote screenplays in his spare time. From 1997 to 2001 he performed his own spoken-word pieces at Austin Poetry Slam venues in Texas, winning the Austin Poetry Slam championship in 1998 and 2001. His first produced screenplay was “Fanboys”, a film that was released in 2009 after a long series of reshoots and delays.
In June 2010 Cline sold his first novel, “Ready Player One”, to Crown after a bidding war, and the film rights went to Warner Bros. the following day. Published in August 2011, the book is set in a dystopian 2045 and follows a teenager, Wade Watts, as he hunts for an Easter egg hidden inside a worldwide virtual reality called the OASIS. Whoever finds it inherits the fortune of the game’s late creator, along with control of the OASIS itself. The film version, which Cline wrote with Zak Penn, was released in March 2018.
His second novel, “Armada” (2015), is about a teenage gamer who learns that the alien invasion game he plays online is really a training simulator. It was a New York Times bestseller, and Universal bought the film rights. “Ready Player Two”, a direct sequel to his debut, followed in November 2020.
Cline’s most recent book is “Bridge to Bat City” (2024), his first novel for children, published by Little, Brown. It tells the story of a recently orphaned girl, Opal B. Flats, who befriends a colony of music-loving bats and helps them to find a new home. His publisher says his books have appeared in more than fifty countries. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).