Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1)

by Ernest Cline

Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective. I’d started doing it after watching a science program from the early ’80s called Cosmos.

The ritual I’m describing here is taken from my own experience as a teenager, after watching the entirety of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on PBS. Sagan’s work helped shape my worldview, and I wanted to pay tribute to him by having him do the same thing for my protagonist Wade.