Ernest Cline Is Taking The Bridge to Bat City

Ernest Cline at an event for the film version of his 2010 novel, Ready Player One. The Austin author has just announced the release date for his debut children's novel, The Bridge to Bat City, set in Austin in the 1980s. (Courtesy of Dan Farah)

With his signature deep dives into nerdy pop culture futures, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is one of Austin's biggest-selling authors. Now he's stepping into his hometown's history for his debut children's novel, Bridge to Bat City, announced this morning.

The book, to be published April 2024 by Little, Brown Books, follows a young girl called Opal B Flats and her adventures with a colony of music-loving bats. Because, after all, what says Austin more than music and bats?

After losing her mother, thirteen-year-old Opal moves in with her uncle Roscoe on the family farm. There, Opal befriends a group of orphaned bats. But just as the farm is starting to feel like home, the bats’ cave is destroyed by a big mining company with its sights set on the farmland next. If Opal and the bats can fit in anywhere, it’s the nearby city of Austin, home to their favorite music and a host of wonderfully eccentric characters. But with people afraid of the bats and determined to get rid of them, it’ll take a whole lot of courage to prove that this is where the bats – and Opal – belong.

Cline earned his laurels as part of Austin's geek elite in the '90s with his buzzy script, Fanboys, which finally made it to the screen in 2009 in a version starring starring Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and Danny Trejo.

In the meantime, he busied himself as a star of Austin's slam poetry scene, collecting some of his verses into a chapbook, The Importance of Being Ernest, in 2001, However, it was his debut novel Ready Player One that made him a household name, and it was adapted by Steven Spielberg in 2018. Cline followed up his debut novel with 2015's Armada, and a sequel, Ready Player Two, released in 2020. Both Armada and Ready Player Two have been optioned for film adaptations (in Armada's case, three years before it was even published).

The publishing deal for The Bridge to Bat City was brokered by Cline's longtime representatives, manager/producing partner, Dan Farah, and literary agent Yfat Reiss Gendell.

Alvina Ling of Little, Brown Books, said, "In Bridge to Bat City, inspired by stories he would tell his kids at bedtime, Ernie Cline has crafted an enchanting tale that weaves together fact and fiction set against the incredible backdrop of 1980s Austin, filled with a vibrant cast of characters, rich music history, activism and environmentalism, and bats! Bridge to Bat City is the type of book I loved to read as a child; It’s a book about being an outsider – a weirdo, even! – but finding a place where you belong.”