Lots of people write fanfiction, Actual Writers included, and a few have even managed to turn their fic-writing endeavors into lucrative franchises. But one writer found the Holy Grail on Monday, when word got out that Andy Weir's Ready Player One fan fiction is canon.
Weir became a household name last year, when his science fiction novel, The Martian, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Matt Damon. After reading Ernest Cline's Ready Player One — which is headed for the big screen in 2018 — Weir was inspired to write "Lacero," a short fanfiction that tells the backstory of one of the original book's antagonists.
To say that Cline enjoyed "Lacero" would be an understatement. He took to Twitter to pronounce it as his "favorite piece of Ready Player One fan fiction." A limited edition of Cline's novel, published by Subterranean Press and now sold out, includes "Lacero" as a canonical addendum.
Weir could not spare his Facebook followers from the onslaught of his excitement on Saturday, when he announced that his Ready Player One fan fiction had become canon:
I’ve written a bestselling novel. I’ve had a blockbuster movie made out of my book. I've gotten drunk with Ridley Scott. But now I have achieved a dream that’s much harder to accomplish; a dream that almost no writers in history have actually had come true: I wrote a fanfic that BECAME CANON!
You can read "Lacero" here, but it comes with a spoiler warning for Cline's novel.
