And Now, A Little Cheerful News...

From Grantland:

Steve Loves the ’80s: Why It Makes Perfect Sense That Spielberg Is Bringing ‘Ready Player One’ to the Big Screen

As reported by Deadline, semi-well-known movie director Steven Spielberg — auteur of such cult art-house flicks as Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Saving Private Ryan — has signed on to direct the film version of Ernest Cline’s 2011 video-game dystopia novel Ready Player One. It’s a sublime pairing of director and source material for several reasons, not the least of which is that this marks, as far as I can tell, the first time in history that a book that mentions a particular filmmaker has been adapted for the screen by said filmmaker. And if it’s not the first time, such an event is at least exceedingly rare. I mean, I Googled it and asked two very knowledgeable people, and they couldn’t remember such a thing having happened before.

Ready Player One is set in a near-future, economically destitute, ecologically ruined United States. The only escape from the drab and dire existence of daily life is the OASIS, a fully realistic and massive online realm encompassing platforms for every conceivable human activity, with the exception of eating and excreting...

Ready Player One was one of the, well, funnest SF novels I had read in a long time.  It has all the elements I loved about golden age SF -- big ideas, terrific pacing, epic sweep, vile villains, underdog heroes -- and the humane, non-Pollyannish, open-heartedness I loved about some of the best of the New Wave SF from the 60s and 70s.  

And unlike some unfilmable SF epics, RPO was made for the big screen, and Speilberg was made to put it there.