Armada - Mind blowingly brilliant

“High school student Zack Lightman glances out his classroom window and spots a UFO. Stranger still, the ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada – in which gamers just happen to be protecting Earth from alien invaders. Zack’s sure he’s lost his mind. But what he’s seeing is all too real, and his skills – as well as those of millions of gamers across the world – are going to be needed to save Earth from what’s about to befall it”.

I was so pumped when I opened the mail and found this book I could almost hear John William’s score from the final scene in the original Star Wars playing in my head. Ready Player One was a truly original reading experience and my anticipation for Armada was relatively high as it’s been 4 years since Cline’s original novel was published. Being a child of the eighties and an enjoyer of arcade games, a story about a young man also living in this world, but getting that fantastical pay off, this was right up my alley from start to finish.

Armada is about a son’s relationship with his parents and an alien invasion with a difference and surprisingly both are equally as compelling and skilfully written.

Cline has a way of identifying exactly which moments tell us the most about two characters in any given situations and making them not only relatable but fun.

“My mom only offered to make me breakfast-for-dinner when she wanted to have a ‘serious talk’ with me.”

I love breakfast for dinner so this immediately brought up allusions to my own family and growing up and I’m sure will do the same for others, yet I’ve never read about the moment being celebrated before now. Zack’s relationship with his amazing mother is complicated by the fact that he was wildly curious about his father when he was young and that every day he looks more and more like him. His reunion with his, previously thought dead, father is beautifully woven into the story. Zack’s dad comes across as real and genuine, and also in that space where a lot of middle-aged men probably find themselves, still trying to transition from boy to man, and wondering what the magic switch is. He has his own fears and reasons for feeling guilty but also carries the desperate hope that he can repair damage done and help save the world. Some of the dialogue as Zack and Xavier Lightman begin their relationship is really touching and in a relatively short time Cline does a fantastic job conveying the journeys of all three characters.

This does not just apply with his parents but also with his friends and fellow gamers who are hilarious and so in sync, I’m not sure they aren’t all separate personalities bouncing around in Cline’s brain.

“’Now I feel bad,’ Diehl said. ‘Like we’re about to nuke Aquaman or The Little Mermaid’.

‘Pretend their Gungans,’ Cruz suggested. ‘…and we get to nuke Jar.’”

A good initial portion of the book is spent establishing that gamers are a society unto themselves that play by their own rules and speak their own language, but also exist quite well within the framework of the rest of society. I feel this was important to explore because in Cline’s previous book the gamers were all physically isolated and alone and whilst there certainly is an element of gamer that spends almost their entire lives on-line seeking a form of escape, there are many others that lead happy lives with families and jobs and just dig video games. The future need not be the ‘single person locked in a dark room in a suit’ situation that has so often been shown to us.

One of the things I enjoy about Clines writing is that almost feeling of precognition that you’ll appreciate and understand if you are familiar with pop culture references and the movies and games he uses. You can sense what line or reference he is about to make given the circumstances because it’s something we’d say ourselves. A small moment where Alex notes a drop of sweat running down the side of someone’s face is a precursor to a Total Recall reference and Bill Paxton and Aliens get’s a nod when one of the soldiers asks, “How do I get out of this chicken shit outfit”. That feeling that the main characters grew up in the exact world you did is an unusual and welcome one for a Science Fiction book where so often the very definition of the genre is that it is futuristic and totally different from where we are now.

In terms of the way the battle scenes are handled there was one thing as a gamer that I thought could have been approached better. In a system where millions of gamers are controlling drones you want to give your best players some sort of priority in terms of skipping the queue when needing a new drone. It makes no sense to have an ace at the back of the line waiting whilst hordes of average games with little to no tactical nuance are sent out ahead of him and I feel it would have been an easy bit of code to write for people designing space stations on the far side of the moon. It certainly adds to the frustration of battle and that feeling of helplessness but, as a casual gamer, if I somehow Forest Gumped my way into a solid position and could hand off to an Ace who has a better chance of saving the world, I’d want to do so rather than try for the Randy Quaid Independence Day solution.

Armada is a wild ride from beginning to end. It builds and builds and then explodes into life with epic space battles that will have your heart pumping as if you were piloting a drone or a mech suit yourself. It flirts with grand questions that affect all mankind while also paying tribute to the small things that define us as individuals. The finale seems to have us heading in a completely different, but perhaps inevitable, direction so I’m really interested to see how Cline approaches the next chapter of Zack’s story.

As I mentioned earlier, I found my expectations were really high for this and much of that was down to the fact that it had been a long time between books and there was always the chance he could be a one hit wonder. I’m incredibly pleased to find this is not the case and Cline has given his readers and fellow Geeks a simply awesome book. I highly recommend Armada to fans of Sci-Fi movies, video games, aliens, conspiracies, alien conspiracies, laugh out loud dialogue, cool futuristic military stuff, great books that are easy to read and all of the above….so yeah pretty much everyone. It’s already being adapted into a film and I can already imagine the cameos as we see people playing their games and saving the world. I think Bill Paxton playing himself, call sign Hudson, would be a nice start.

Armada is on sale July 14 and is published by The Crown Publishing Group.