I think I was doomed to be a nerd, because my father is a particle physicist and my mother was an electrical engineer. My dad had an infinite supply of 1950s and ’60s science fiction novels. It’s interesting, in that the SF that I read when I was growing up was one generation off of what you’d expect for my age. I grew up reading baby-boomer SF. My holy trinity of authors is Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Ernest Cline is the author of the best-selling science fiction novel Ready Player One, which is currently being adapted for film by Steven Spielberg. Cline also wrote the screenplay for Fanboys, about a group of hardcore Star Wars fans, and he recently appeared in the documentary film Atari: Game Over, about the collapse of the once mighty video game company Atari, which was forced to bury hundreds of thousands of unsold game cartridges in the New Mexico desert. Cline’s new novel, Armada, about video game champs battling aliens, is out now.