Ernest Cline, the author of Ready Player One, makes his children’s debut with contemporary middle grade novel Bridge to Bat City. Inspired by the real-life colony of Mexican free-tailed bats living in Austin, this 1980s–set tale follows 13-year-old Opal who, after her mother’s death, moves to her uncle Roscoe’s farm. There, she befriends a group of bats, whose appreciation of Opal’s music taste brings them together, making Opal feel less alone. When mining developers destroy the bats’ cave and threaten Uncle Roscoe’s livelihood, Opal—accompanied by 1.5 million bats—moves to Austin. But the flying mammals might be too much for even “the wildest and weirdest and most-welcoming” place in Texas. Cline spoke with PW about keeping Austin weird, how his own life informed Opal’s journey, and publishing a book almost 30 years in the making.
You’ve published adult fiction, poetry collections, and screenplays. In what ways did writing Bridge to Bat City differ from developing your previous works?
Writing children’s fiction was never on my list of things to do. But when I first saw the bats, I thought, “That would be a great idea for a kid’s story.” So, I’ve had this idea kicking around for, like, 28 years. I always assumed someone else would take it and run with it and I would get to say, “I knew that was a great idea.” But that never happened. And then, once I established myself as an author and a screenwriter, I was able to pursue whatever interests I wanted and write about whatever I wanted, and this story always stuck with me. I used a lot of elements from my own life and my experiences having kids and reading a lot of children’s fiction with them. I got to revisit stories that I loved, like Charlotte’s Web and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Because of my kids, I still feel really in touch with what it’s like to be a kid, especially one who’s just about to become a teenager. That period of life is still real vivid in my memory.
It was all real exciting and a departure from what I had written before. It also felt like a lot less pressure. After Ready Player One, everything following it was very high pressure. This was something I just wanted to write for myself. I wanted to write a story about music and weirdness because I was a weird kid.
How did your experiences in Austin and learning about the bat colony shape Bridge to Bat City?
I moved to Austin in 1996, right around the time that I lost my mother. I was interested in living in the South; I grew up in Ohio and I wanted to live somewhere warm. I was also interested in technology and computers and making movies, and I knew Austin was the center for all that. So, I moved to Austin and found out that it was the perfect city for me. My weird sensibilities fit right in. To this day, it’s still my favorite city. It’s a unique, open, welcoming, open-mined, open-hearted place, and very unlike the rest of Texas—they call it the blueberry in the tomato soup. That makes it a beacon for all the weirdos who grew up in small towns, because it’s the epicenter of counterculture. I wanted to remind people that there are cool places and kind people in Texas.
Bridge to Bat City being based on something real is what gets me excited for kids to read it. If it resonates with them, then they can actually visit Austin someday and see the bridge and the bats and see that a lot of the story elements are true. And they’ll see that the bats are basically Austin’s mascots—we have a statue of them downtown. It’s the kind of story I wish I had known about when I was a kid. It seems fantastic, but it’s real.
We’re releasing Bridge to Bat City in Austin on the day of the solar eclipse. I convinced my local indie bookstore to hold the launch event at the bat bridge. April isn’t the best time for bat viewing—that’s around August—but they start showing up in the evening around this time of year, so there will hopefully be some bats also in attendance at my book launch. I’m excited.
What role does music play in your writing and in your personal life?
I love music. I listen to music every day, all the time, and I sing along to songs with my family in the car. Music is a huge part of my life and a huge part of my writing process. When I write, I listen to music without lyrics, usually film scores because lyrics distract me. I’ve actually created soundtracks of all the songs that are mentioned in Ready Player One, Ready Player Two, and Armada that I put into playlists on Spotify so people could listen while they read. In fact, Armada has a cassette tape insert with a track list that you can cut out of the back of the book and put into a cassette tape.
So, the characters I create end up having music as a big part of their life, too. But this is a music-themed story, more than all my other books. Opal is my first character who’s obsessed with music. When she was a baby, she wouldn’t stop crying unless her mom had the radio on, so she would listen to the radio all the time and became obsessed with Buddy Holly. When Opal has to get glasses, she picks ones that make her look like Buddy Holly.
How much research did you do about the Mexican free-tailed bats and their history?
That was the biggest bulk of the work that I had to do. I had to find out when the bats actually moved into the bridge and the circumstances surrounding that. What I did with Bridge to Bat City was kind of condense a whole decade of events.
Initially, people were terrified because they saw the sky filled with bats at night. It’s one of the things that drew me to this story. Austin had refurbished this bridge downtown and added these gaps underneath so that it could expand and retract during the heat and the cold, and these gaps ended up being a perfect place for the bats to roost. A million bats moved in overnight, sometime around 1982. It really terrified the city. They even ran an ad in the local newspaper that said something like, “Bat colonies sink teeth into city.” There was discussion of using flamethrowers to burn them out and then putting up screens over the gaps in the bridge so they couldn’t get back in because people were that frightened of them. And I learned that one of the reasons they were called Mexican free-tailed was because while most of them are born in Texas, they reproduce down in Mexico sometimes. And because of Texas’s relationship with Mexico and prejudice against Mexican Americans, that same prejudice built right into their name. Suddenly, people liked them even less. And so, there was this idea of these bats coming to live in Austin that resonated with ideas of immigration and becoming part of a community.
But then other people pointed out that Austin is the live music capital of the world, and these bats eat their own body weight in bugs every night. These bats moving in was the best thing that could ever happen because it made it a lot more pleasant to be outside. So, for a city that’s known for outdoor music, it was perfect.
I also had to research bats’ ability to spread diseases. They’re mammals, so it makes it dangerous for us to interact with them because diseases can jump from bats to humans. So, I never have anybody handling bats in the story, because you’re not supposed to touch them. If you see a downed bat, that means the bat is sick; it wouldn’t be down on the ground otherwise. But diseases like rabies, in populations like this, are actually much less prevalent than in dog populations. So, as an animal for humans to coexist with, it really is quite safe. And it’s not a problem here in Austin, even though we have this massive urban bat colony right in the middle of downtown.
Ready Player One was adapted into a movie and an Armada adaptation is in the works. Do you have plans to adapt Bridge to Bat City into a movie?
One of the producers from Ready Player One, my friend and manager Dan Farah, will be a producer on it. We’re waiting for the book to come out before we take it out to Hollywood.
But the first adaptation has already happened: the audiobook! It’s amazing because it’s narrated by my friend Felicia Day, who’s this super talented actress who lived in Austin for a while. I moved to Austin right around the same time that Felicia did, and she and I went to a lot of the same Alamo Drafthouse movie screenings and stuff here in town. She had all these memories about the locations in the story, just like the illustrator for Bridge to Bat City, Mishka Westell.
Did you always imagine this as an illustrated story?
I did! My wife [Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz], who’s a bestselling nonfiction author, also has amazing drawing skills. As a favor to me, she made some rough pencil drawings of what I imagined the illustrations would be and I hung them on the wall while I was writing the book. I still have them up.
Mishka recreated all those illustrations, plus a bunch of additional ones. I really wanted an Austin-based artist to do the art, and I gave my publisher a list of artists and Mishka was at the top of it. She’s never illustrated a children’s book before, but she was down to give it a try. She’d done all these amazing Austin rock posters for concerts and film events, so I knew she would do a great job. From the very beginning, I was like, “This would be a perfect Pixar or DreamWorks Animation story.”
Bridge to Bat City by Ernest Cline, illus. by Mishka Westell. Little, Brown, $17.99 Apr. 9 ISBN 978-0-316-46058-3
