Armada
Few books from a young author have been more eagerly anticipated than this month’s new release from Ernest Cline — especially since it was first touted over three years ago. The excitement for his sophomore project stems, naturally enough, from the big success of his debut novel, Ready Player One, which truly appeared out of the blue but nonetheless went on to win several awards and many fans, as well as a forthcoming Hollywood adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg.
His debut boasted an utterly beguiling voice and tone. It managed to be an optimistic dystopia, if such an oxymoron is allowed. Player One depicts a generally hellish future primed to crack open, but with the right amount of zeal, faith, enthusiasm, guts, and ingenuity from the protagonist and his pals. Cline took pop culture detritus — the songs, TV shows, and arcade games of the 1980s — and made something approaching High Art. He showed an intimacy with video games most authors of literary fiction, or even of genre fiction, seem to lack — Neal Stephenson being one major exception, and also the lodestar for what Cline was doing at, perhaps, a slightly lower level of craft and genius.
His new book, Armada, starts out as a determinedly “naïve” yet metatextual unfolding of a familiar, almost hackneyed trope: the covert training of gamers by a secret agency that intends to use their joystick skills in an alien war. It proceeds through some deliberate disinformation that leaves both the protagonist and the reader guessing as to Cline’s intentions. But soon, the story emerges into heart-on-the-sleeve, old-fashioned sci-fi. The zigzag odyssey through these stages is both necessary and successful, producing a book that both acknowledges our current sophistication and cynicism and simultaneously disarms those useless qualities.
The book opens in the year 2018, in a world pretty much identical to our day and age. (An unnamed female president of the USA betokens a small shift.) Our focal narrator is Zack Lightman, eighteen years old, just on the point of (maybe) graduating high school. Rebellious, his future in doubt, Zack lives alone with his widowed mom, his father having died when Zack was only a toddler. But one aspect of his life gives the goodhearted lad some purpose and direction. Zack is a top player in “Armada,” the world’s most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Game. As he confides, “I played it every night and all day on the weekends. I’d even ditched school a few times to play elite missions on servers in Asia that were scheduled in the middle of the day over here.” The object of the game is to defeat invading aliens (of course).
When Zack sees one of the CGI alien ships actually materialize in the sky outside his classroom window, he is naturally disturbed. Crazy much? He is then motivated to reexamine some of his father’s old diaries, which speculate that gaming and reality might be congruent. But before he can do anything, the good guys from Armada, the Earth Defense Alliance, show up at Zack’s school and enlist him in the emergent real-life battle against the actual aliens, who turn out to be from Europa, moon of Jupiter. Before you can say The Last Starfighter, Zack is in uniform and engaged in a life-or-death quest for his own survival and that of our planet.
{{ product: 9780804137256 }}After his enlistment Cline has Zack — and by extension, the reader — experience niggling doubts about the validity of what the boy is undergoing. During orientation, Zack thinks: “But there were still a lot of things about this story that bothered me. For one, the details of NASA’s discovery on Europa were giving me a strange sense of déjà vu. . . . Carl Sagan himself had written a similar scenario into his first and only science fiction novel, Contact.” He throws in small details, such as the fact that in a certain microgravity environment, full gravity still obtains. Maybe Zack is merely a pawn in some kind of Philip K. Dick−style simulacrum, for purposes unknown. After all, hasn’t the entire existence of aliens and the EDA been kept hidden for forty-two years, in the biggest cover-up in history? And haven’t readers like us been trained by various disillusioning events of the past fifty years to doubt everything the authorities tell us?
But after running this riff a while, Cline comes down firmly on the side of “this is not a dream nor a sham.” Yes, the official secret history has some holes and lies in it — vital ones, as Zack and his pals soon discover. But millions of dead citizens, perishing under alien attacks, have a way of conferring substance greater than any hoax. The stakes are real, and Zack and his young allies — including the spontaneous love of his life, cool hacker girl Lex Larkin (yes, she has the initials L.L., like Superman’s Lois Lane and Lex Luthor) — have to choose the wisest course or doom the whole species.
With this stance, Cline echoes his own debut novel. Yes, a game is a game. But all our actions, even gaming, have real-world consequences. And we should always seek to Do the Right Thing under all circumstances.
This message is not delivered, however, in any heavy-handed fashion. This is a rollicking, nonstop mind movie of a novel. Zack’s narrative voice is deft and witty, able to convey humor and heroism, comedy and tragedy. On the eve of mortal combat with the aliens, given a new, super-science communications device, he can’t help asking, “Can I play Sonic the Hedgehog on this thing, too?” His patois, along with that of his fellow gamers, is allusively dense with myriad references to related pop culture and literary artifacts. This is the kind of book in which people bond by uttering and recognizing movie quips and names from fantastical fiction. Just prior to Lex Larkin bestowing her first kiss on Zack, she prefaces the gesture by quoting, without footnotes, Han Solo’s remark to Princess Leia: “Don’t go getting all mushy on me now, princess.”
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="296"] Ernest Cline.[/caption]
Is such behavior shallow? Only if you also believe that two disguised Christians in Imperial Rome, offering a sketched sign of the Cross as a fraternal token, were shallow as well. The code and ethos that Zach and his peers live by might have been cobbled together out of tidbits from Star Wars and Dune, but it is their real religion nonetheless. In this aspect, the book shares a thesis with the recent George Clooney film Tomorrowland, which proclaims that faith in a vision of the future can lead to the actual instantiation of a better world.
There are some really thrilling big set pieces here, particularly the battle scenes. Cline has a handle on how to convey in prose the visceral reality of something being experienced virtually, through a joystick and goggles. But what will really stay with and impact the reader is the person-to-person interaction. Zack undergoes a vast maturation process during a very brief timespan, and his revelatory understandings about himself and other people are the beating heart of the tale.
He concludes his tale with his usual mix of pop culture wisdom, but this time with the different tone of having earned it under fire, circling back resonantly to the boy he was on page one.
For the time being, I intended to follow Master Yoda’s timeless advice — to keep my mind on where I was, and what I was doing. And to do everything I could to protect what was now most important to me. After all the things that had happened to me, after everything I’d been through, I no longer found myself staring out the window and daydreaming of adventure.
Cline includes so many clever and apt references to prior works of speculative fiction in this vein that the critic is left hanging for salient comparisons not already adduced. My notes call for an impressive citation of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit — Will Travel, but then I found Cline citing it in Chapter 18. I don’t believe, however, that I saw any reference to Guardians of the Galaxy in the novel (save for a glancing moment when Lex calls Zack “Star Lord”), probably due to that film not being released during the composition of the book. So let me just say that Armada recalls the joy, verve, and surprising pathos of that potent piece of entertainment.
Recently the “alien invasion of Earth” motif has come in for something of a renaissance, with two authors being at the forefront: John Scalzi, with his series that began with Old Man’s War; and Robert Buettner with his saga that opened with Orphanage. Additionally and notably, Will McIntosh spun an off-kilter version of such a tale last year in Defenders. And of course, the immensely popular Transformers franchise will soon be joined by a sequel to Independence Day.
When the alien invasion tide in films and fiction was at its previous height in the 1950s, critics chalked up its popularity to the subtextualization of Cold War anxieties. But in 2015, when a multipolar sharing of political and military power obtains and large, global conflicts have been replaced by dozens of brushfire wars, it is arguably harder to pluck a precipitating raison d’être out of the zeitgeist for the resurgence of such tales. Fear of terrorism? Fear of refugees and immigrants? Fear of our own planet-destroying technology? Or does the hidden allure not necessarily stem from fear at all? Perhaps readers and viewers just wish to contemplate, as Cline postulates, their own reaction to the potential destruction of human civilization by outsiders, and see whether they themselves would leap to the defense of hearth and home in a suitably brave and noble fashion — grace under pressure being the operative definition of heroism.
Of course, as Armada entertainingly shows us, a stupid, reflexive lashing-out might be worse than no defense at all. And wisdom in wartime lies in distinguishing the real enemy, which is, all too often, our own lack of empathy.