Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 158 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Ernest Klein, author of the best-selling science fiction novel Ready Player

1, which is currently being adapted for film by Stephen Spielberg.

Klein also wrote the screenplay for the movie Fan Boys

about a group of hardcore Star Wars fans,

and he also 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.

Klein's new novel Armada about video game champs battling aliens

is out now.

And now here's our interview with Ernest Klein.

All right, so we're here with Ernest Klein.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

All right, so you're known for writing these books that are full of obscure geeky

references from your childhood.

So first of all, just tell us a bit about how you got so obsessed with science fiction and video games as a kid.

Oh, I think I was just born at the perfect time for that to happen.

I was five years old when Star Wars came out and I have a vivid memory of the first video game I ever played was Space Invaders the following year and I'd just seen a re-release of Star Wars because that was when you

know you had to wait for the movie to come back and I was trying to was going to see it as

many times as possible during the re-release in 1978 and that was when Space Invaders arrived in America and I

...