The subject of this entry is the novel Armada, by Ernest Cline. I've been impatiently awaiting this book since falling in love with Cline's first work, Ready Player One. RP1 was both great fun and incredibly insightful, and it was the top of the list of scifi novels my coworker and I wanted approved for our science fiction literature course at school.
With all that in mind, I was super excited when my Kindle downloaded the e-book format of Armada (as well as the e-book of Go Set A Watchman, which is next on my list to read) on Tuesday. I finished it today (Saturday)--please forgive me for reading slowly, but I am reading two other books simultaneously.
Quick and dirty plot summary: An 18-yr-old gamer discovers that video games (as well as science fiction movies, tv shows, and novels) have been intended to train humans to fight against an eventual alien invasion, which, it turns out, is imminent. This kid discovers that his father, who had also been a gamer and had died when the narrator was just a baby, had uncovered some of this hidden government "conspiracy" and was actually still alive, having been recruited into the military to train for the invasion, and is stationed on the moon, where the narrator is sent upon his own recruitment. Father and son are reunited and discuss the conspiracy and the alien invasion, agreeing that there are some suspicious elements to the aliens' actions over the years. As the invasion begins, father and son, along with several other recruits, fight the alien drones with drones the human governments have prepared over the years (keeping most of their soldiers and pilots out of immediate harm's way), but as the battle continues, the father and son realize that humanity might be making a mistake and that the aliens' intent might not be as hostile as it has appeared. They uncover the truth: humans actually initiated the original hostilities, and the aliens could have epically destroyed us years before but never have, despite Earth's escalation of hostilities over the years. The narrator and his father decide that the only way to truly know the aliens' intentions is to disable the weapon of mass destruction that Earth was about to deploy against the aliens and attempt to negotiate a cease fire. This means defying orders and actually destroying some of Earth's own defenses, during which the narrator's father must sacrifice his own life for the cause. The narrator successfully destroys the weapon, and is immediately engaged in conversation with an alien emissary who confirms what the narrator and his father had suspected: this was all a test of humanity's ability to be peaceful. Thanks to the actions of the narrator and his father, humanity is spared destruction and is offered entrance into an alliance of alien races called the Sodality. The narrator, speaking on behalf of humanity, agrees, and Earth is ushered into a time of prosperity and health. [And all that took place in one day.] The narrator, slightly suspicious of the aliens' benevolent intentions and realizing that he can't simply go back to his old life as a teenaged gamer, agrees to be an ambassador to the alliance. And they all live happily ever after.
Quick and dirty (and slightly inappropriate) review: an orgy involving Ready Player One, Ender's Game, the scifi spoof Galaxy Quest, and the new Adam Sandler movie Pixels, all while listening to Star-Lord's mixtape from Guardians of the Galaxy.
Review: So, it's hard for me to feel like I'm being fair to this book in my judgment, because I'm holding it up in comparison to two of my very favorite books of all time, Cline's Ready Player One and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Cline even references EG several times, as part of the plot the narrator's father has pieced together about the intent of scifi to prepare humanity for alien invasion. But instead of feeling like an homage, it ends up feeling like a ripoff. The use of games for training, the fact that the narrator has an anger-management problem involving bullies, the fact that it all turns out to be sort of a misunderstanding and that humans are actually the aggressors...instead of feeling like a reimagining of those elements, it just feels like they've been done before.
The aliens have intercepted and interpreted our fictional and nonfictional broadcasts (TV, movies, internet, newscasts, videogames) just like in Galaxy Quest, being unable to tell the difference between reality and fiction, and feel that we are prone to violence but that we must be given a chance to prove ourselves. Fifty years of secret engagements and encounters with alien space craft (all drones piloted by some being or beings elsewhere in the galaxy) have allowed humanity the chance to reverse engineer the alien tech and increase our own technological abilities, also allowing us to eventually "take the fight to them". Still feels an awful lot like EG, but also reminded me quite a bit of Q's trial in Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the final episode of the show, Captain Picard finds out that the trial that Q initiated in the pilot episode, "Encounter at Far Point," had never actually ended, and that the entire seven-season run of the show had been under the Q continuum's scrutiny. Zack Lightman, the narrator of Armada, manages to save and redeem humanity in a similar test.
But, unlike both EG and STTNG, humanity never actually meets the real aliens. All contact, hostile or otherwise, is conducted through the use of drones. This actually makes Zack a bit suspicious, especially when the drones help rebuild Earth's cities after the battle and then provide all kinds of advance tech and medical advancements, which leads him to become an ambassador (as though he can somehow keep an eye on the aliens and make sure their intentions are pure). I was almost waiting for the other shoe to drop at the end of the book, expecting some kind of big plot twist like in the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man." But that didn't happen, and everything just kind of got tied up nice and neat at the end, including a final encounter with the now-mature-and-reformed bully from the first chapter. It all felt a little too easy.
Then there's the use of drones to fight on both sides. Although it ends up being explained at the end as sensible for the aliens because the drones are all being controlled by a single sentient? computer, it makes fighting seem so much less important and dangerous because pilots can simply "respawn" in a new drone. This tactic is conveniently used in the climactic fight between Zack and the admiral who wants to deploy the WMD against the alien planet, because the admiral is a better pilot than Zack. Zack respawns several times in drones that he was smart enough to bring with him in case of emergency (while the admiral somehow neglected to do the same). Yet, when the deaths of characters is needed for dramatic effect (such as the death of Zack's father), it suddenly becomes important to have a few actually-manned ships available. The tactics of the humans and aliens just never quite ring true.
There isn't much available by way of character development, since the majority of the story takes place in a single day. Zack suffers from the absence of his father, as he shows us through his interaction with a bully who gives him a hard time about how his father supposedly died (in an explosion in a waste treatment plant), his hero-worship of his father's belongings (like Star-Lord's addiction to his mother's mixtape), and his poor lonely but pop-culture-savvy mother. He compares his circumstances several times to the heroes such movies as Iron Eagle, Top Gun, and Star Wars, but again, instead of feeling clever, innovative, or insightful, these comparisons seem designed to remind us that Zack is a hero and a rule-breaker, since we only just met him. We don't get to know any of the other top gamers who were recruited, other than some very minor backstory, so when some of them die in various stages of the battle, it feels more like the loss of the redshirt member of every away mission of Star Trek. We also don't meet Zack's father long enough to see any negative personality qualities. He lives up to Zack's ideals: a super gamer (who has actually been playing against Zack online all these years), a faithful husband to Zack's mom (who also has remained faithful to Zack's dad and doesn't date or anything like that--they even manage to squeeze in a fling before his death, leading to the birth nine months later of Zack's much younger brother), and a heroic figure who breaks rules when necessary and sacrifices himself to save mankind. A few other flings are squeezed into the story as well--several of the other recruits manage to hook up before the battle, and there's a romantic interest for Zack who conveniently pops into the story to do things like jailbreak his reverse-engineered-alien-tech-communicator-thingy so that he can circumvent the government's plans without them overhearing him most of the time and then pops back out until she's needed in her mech drone to save his butt (and then pops back in and out AGAIN).
Everything just seemed way too CONVENIENT, I guess. There weren't any real surprises. And all the pop culture references, which were so important to the story in Ready Player One, just weren't really needed here. It seemed like Cline thought to himself, "RP1 was super-successful and had all those pop culture references in it, so I must do that again in this next book."
Overall, I did really enjoy the book. But it was more of a summer-fluff-type read than the deep, thought-provoking joyride of Ready Player One. If you like scifi references, conspiracy theories, and gaming, I definitely recommend it. But don't expect anything life-changing, you know? May the force be with you.
