Do we like Ernest Cline?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful of his own turned up and his stated themes lean empathetic, but the record is thin and his work has drawn fair criticism.
Ernest Cline is the Ohio-born writer behind Ready Player One, the 80s-nostalgia VR adventure that Steven Spielberg turned into a 2018 film. He followed it with the sequel Ready Player Two in late 2020. He is a nerd's nerd, and he has said his success handed him a huge platform to say something about his worldview.
Scandal-wise, there isn't one. Searches for lawsuits, court rulings or allegations against him came back empty, and the only Cline legal stories that turned up belonged to a different author with a similar surname. That is the whole list, mate, and it's a short one.
On the harm test, the live argument is about the books, not the bloke. The A.V. Club's review of Ready Player Two argued it tried but failed to fix problems in the original, saying Cline “clumsily tries to address” the first book's criticisms, and finding it disappointing that the protagonist needs 28 years and VR to see trans women as women. That is a critic's read of a novel, not a statement from Cline, and I found no campaigning, conspiracy talk or culture-war grifting from him.
In interviews he comes across as worried about tech rather than cheering it on. He told Here & Now that “empathy is something we are in dire need of”, and he told the Telegraph that tech bosses like Zuckerberg are kids with too much power. He also said he wanted to address empathy, gender and race without stalling the story.
The awkward bit is the Readyverse. In January 2024 he teamed up with producer Dan Farah and the metaverse firm Futureverse on a platform built around his own novel, which warns about escaping into virtual worlds. Gizmodo called it a textbook torment nexus, where the author of a cautionary tale builds the thing he warned about. That is irony and a business choice, not harm to anyone, but fans of his warnings may find it a bit much.
So where do we land? Nothing harmful from him, no sign of a bad-boss pattern, and a stated interest in empathy. The reason it's a 6 and not an 8 is how little there is on what he has actually done for other people, and a mixed record on how his stories treat women and minorities.