Cline’s dream had effectively come true: he had broken into Skywalker Ranch and was making the coming-of-age film he had always wanted to make. But when Fanboys finally hit theaters in 2009, 10 years after Cline wrote his first draft, the response was tepid. Cline blames the negative reactions on Harvey Weinstein, the film’s producer, who insisted that a new director come on for reshoots and that certain cuts be made in the film. "It was so easy to codify The Empire as The Weinstein Company," Cline says, "and people started called him Darth Weinstein." Cline claims that Weinstein wanted the film to be more like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but for geeks. The two movie posters are indeed nearly identical, save for a Darth Vader helmet.

"It was so easy to codify The Empire as The Weinstein Company."

After wrestling for creative control over Fanboys, Cline decided that he’d quit screenwriting and write a novel. He had another idea ready, one he’d been toying with for years. "What if Willy Wonka was a video game designer and held a contest inside his greatest video game?" Cline spent eight years writing Ready Player One before it hit the presses in August 2011. Set in 2044, Cline’s book prophesied a future where everybody’s always plugged in to The Oasis, a virtual world hosting the Earth’s jobs, education, and secrets. Each Oasis user hooks in using a variety of haptic and visual inputs to simulate and stimulate the senses in a virtual world. Ready Player One is indebted to hundreds of other books, games, and films like The Matrix, and it wears them on its shirt-sleeve. Cline’s most original creation yet moved away from Star Wars into a world of his own, a world made out of his favorite things. Protagonist Wade Watts, of course, drives a souped-up DeLorean.

"I wasn't sure if I was writing glorified fan fiction… you can't have Ultraman fighting Mechagodzilla and get away with it," he says, but publishers immediately bit. "Every publisher in New York wanted to publish it. There was a bidding war over my weird book about Atari, Pac-Man, Cyndi Lauper, and Wang Chung."

Cline had grown up inspired by the mythology invented by George Lucas, but he now finds himself inspiring a next generation of creators and inventors. Less than a year after his novel was published, Oculus VR debuted the Oculus Rift, a device not so different from the "Oasis Visor" used by Watts. Ready Player One became Exhibit A for what a future filled with Oculus Rift users might look like — Oculus founder Palmer Luckey asks every new employee to read Ready Player One before their start date, Cline claims. After trying out the Oculus, Cline says that the Oasis might be no more than 10 years away.

Cline sees his books as little visions of Star Wars from a different time, and with different heroes. These stories are inspired by Lucas but also by one of Lucas’ inspirations: Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a book that formalizes "the hero’s journey" into the common man’s quest for supernatural wonder. "We've been telling these stories and using these storytelling tricks since we were telling stories around the campfire," says Cline, "and they still work now, even in big Hollywood movies." Cline’s novels subscribe to Campbell’s theory and are inspired by Lucas’ work, but also offer something of their own: a hyper-aware, meta-textual perspective informed by the entire nerd lexicon.