The Importance of Being Ernest

Ernest Cline

Aug 2014 · SCB Distributors

About this ebook

Familiar and resonant, Cline's collection takes readers into a private landscape of science fiction, pop culture, and pornography. Ernest Cline is a geek, novelist, poet, and screenwriter based in Austin, Texas. In addition to winning poetry slams, Cline is known for screenwriting "Fanboys," released in 2009. He also recently sold the film rights to his latest book, "Armada."

Ratings and reviews

You know how you can tell what kind of person the author is by what they write? One of the poems within this collection, Nerd Porn Auteur, is the most full-on display of Ernest Cline's fascination with porn and geekdom. If it were a personification, it would be a geek who repeatedly harass women whilst wearing a Superman t-shirt and lamenting that he's a "Nice guy who deserves a smart girl." It is the ultimate "Nice Guy" slam poem, one that admonishes anyone who doesn't have Cline's thought process as a "beer-swilling alpha male." In this age where women in geek communities are still being harassed, Cline's poem is one of the rhetorics that many male geeks have when it comes to their perception on women, instead of, you know, seeing them as people rather than a mystical, lustful object. While this poem was written in the early 2000s, if you have read the Ready Player books, you can see that Cline has never really grew out of that fascination on porn and women. I got this ebook for a more in-depth review of Cline, but reading all of his poems are just painful. I cannot believe he got famous writing these.

About the author

Ernest Cline is an American screenwriter and novelist. He was born in 1972 and grew up in rural Ohio. In 1998, Cline wrote a screenplay entitled, Fanboys, about the craze surrounding the prequels to the Star Wars movies. Over a decade later, the movie was finally released in 2009. However, creative differences and his dissatisfaction with the final edit, led Cline to quit screenwriting and write a novel. That novel, based on an idea he had been considering for years, became the New York Times Bestseller, Ready Player One. His second novel, Armada released in 2015 also became a New York Times Bestseller. He made the Hollywood Reporter's 'Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list, entering at number 12.