Ernest Cline
4 Quotations from Ernest Cline
| ET n. | 2015 Armada xx. 270 ‘Well, hello there!’ I heard my father say over the comm. ‘This is General Xavier Lightman of the Earth Defense Alliance. Where do you assholes think you’re headed?’ After a pause, he added: ‘Klaatu barada nikto, fellas.’ Then, perhaps taking his own stab at some gallows humor, he whistled the five-note message used to communicate with the friendly ETs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The same tones that bookended each of the Europans’ montage transmissions. |
| Europan n. 1 | 2015 Armada xx. 270 ‘Well, hello there!’ I heard my father say over the comm. ‘This is General Xavier Lightman of the Earth Defense Alliance. Where do you assholes think you’re headed?’ After a pause, he added: ‘Klaatu barada nikto, fellas.’ Then, perhaps taking his own stab at some gallows humor, he whistled the five-note message used to communicate with the friendly ETs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The same tones that bookended each of the Europans’ montage transmissions. |
| hobbit-hole n. | 2015 Armada i. 9 ‘Thor doesn’t need to detect his enemies so he can run off and hide in his little Hobbit hole!’ Diehl whispered. ‘Mjolnir is powerful enough to destroy mountains, and it can also emit energy blasts, create force fields, and summon lightning. The hammer also always returns to Thor’s hand after he throws it, even if it has to tear through an entire planet to get back to him! And only Thor can wield it!’ |
| power-up n. | 2011 Ready Player One i. 23 I’d seized upon this idea a few years earlier when I coded my first Atari 2600 game (a gunter rite of passage, like a Jedi building his first lightsaber). It was a Pitfall rip-off called The Stacks where you had to navigate through a vertical maze of trailers, collecting junk computers, snagging food-voucher power-ups, and avoiding meth addicts and pedophiles on your way to school. My game was a lot more fun than the real thing. |