No one in the world gets what they want and that is beautiful.
I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid Deal with it.
You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.
I couldn't make myself be cautious around her. A little voice in my head kept trying to tell me that every word she said could be disinformation and that she might be playing me for a fool. But I didn't believe it. I trusted her, even though I had every reason not to.
My favorite video game of all time is called 'Black Tiger'. It's a Capcom Dungeons and Dragons game from 1987. I have the actual arcade version sitting in my office.
I've never really collected anything other than old Atari cartridges. I only had, like, 12 Atari games as a kid, so at some point in my 20s I decided I was going to own all of them.
I spent most of my childhood welded to my Atari 2600, until I got my first computer, a TRS-80.
I've been to Oculus a few times to do book signings and things there, and they tell me 'Ready Player One' is, like, required reading for new employees.
VR really changes everything for flight because the old simulators for the PC were 2D, and you couldn't look around inside the cockpit and learn the controls or even track other planes through the cockpit.
I'm surprised that VR has come about so quickly. It's lucky I just happened to write a book imagining virtual reality right on the cusp of it actually happening.
I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
In a zombie apocalypse movie, nobody's ever seen a zombie movie. Or in an alien invasion movie, nobody has ever seen an alien invasion movie, like 'Independence Day.'
I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.'
I was just starting out, trying to become a screenwriter, and I became the Austin slam champion three times. For a nerdy, kind of a socially awkward guy, that did wonders for my self esteem.
I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.
For the whole history of cinema, we've been experiencing movies and television through a two-dimensional, letterboxed window. But once you can start programming entertainment for all the different senses, it becomes a wholly different medium.
I have to avoid things like 'World of Warcraft' or 'Minecraft', otherwise I'd never get any work done.
