With his signature deep dives into nerdy pop culture futures, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is one of Austin's biggest-selling authors. A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. This is a weird and wonderful “mostly true tall tale” about how a recently orphaned girl named Opal B Flats helped a family of displaced bats find a new home under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas. There, Opal bonds with Uncle Roscoe over music and befriends a group of orphaned, music-loving bats. But just as the farm is starting to feel like home, the bats' cave is destroyed by a big mining company with its sights set on the farmland next.

Cline’s Ready Player One is a dystopian, sci-fi novel about Wade Watts, a teenager in the year 2044. Cline is otherwise best known for penning the 2015 sci-fi novel Armada, which follows another teenage gamer who discovers that the alien-invasion-themed game he’s been playing is actually a simulator to prepare humanity for a real-world invasion. Cline earned his laurels as part of Austin's geek elite in the '90s with his buzzy script, Fanboys, which finally made it to the screen in 2009 in a version starring starring Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and Danny Trejo. But with people afraid of the bats and determined to get rid of them, it’ll take a whole lot of courage to prove that this is where the bats – and Opal – belong. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Yes, I was the editor of this book and perhaps biased, but I truly love this book and hope you love it as much as I do! His book deal was brokered by manager and producing partner Dan Farah and literary agent Yfat Reiss Gendell. If Opal and the bats can fit in anywhere, it’s the nearby city of Austin, home to their favorite music and a host of wonderfully eccentric characters.

The Austin author has just announced the release date for his debut children's novel, The Bridge to Bat City, set in Austin in the 1980s.

Bridge to Bat City' follows Steven Spielberg adapting Cline’s 2011 dystopian, sci-fi novel about a teen's quest to win control over a virtual universe.

There, Opal bonds with Unclue Roscoe over music and befriends a group of orphaned, music-loving bats. But just as the farm is starting to feel like home, the bats’ cave is destroyed by a big mining company that has its sights on the family’s land, as well. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. His first novel, Ready Player One, was a New York Times and USA Today bestseller, appeared on numerous “best of the year” lists, and is set to be adapted into a motion picture by Warner Bros.Cline is best known for his debut novel Ready Player One — a beloved work of science fiction that follows 18-year-old Wade Watts as he looks to claim the fortune of a late video game creator by completing a quest to discover an Easter egg hidden within one of his virtual reality worlds. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In the meantime, he busied himself as a star of Austin's slam poetry scene, collecting some of his verses into a chapbook, The Importance of Being Ernest, in 2001, However, it was his debut novel Ready Player One that made him a household name, and it was adapted by Steven Spielberg in 2018. Ernest Cline, the best-selling novelist who saw his popular first published book, Ready Player One, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a tentpole movie, has unveiled his debut kids novel, Bridge to Bat City. Now he's stepping into his hometown's history for his debut children's novel, Bridge to Bat City, announced this morning.

Cline followed up his debut novel with 2015's Armada, and a sequel, Ready Player Two, released in 2020. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Set for publication in April 2024, the book is described as a “mostly true tall tale” about a recently orphaned young girl named Opal B Flats, who forms an unexpected friendship with a music-loving colony of bats and helps them find a new home against all odds. If Opal and the bats can fit in anywhere, it's the nearby city of Austin, home to their favorite music and a host of wonderfully eccentric characters. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games. After losing her mother, 13-year-old Opal moves in with her uncle Roscoe on the family farm, and it’s there that she befriends a group of orphaned bats. But with people afraid of the bats and determined to get rid of them, it'll take a whole lot of courage to prove that this is where the bats--and Opal--belong.