A billions-strong alien invasion
force is bearing down on hapless Earth and only an angst-ridden teen
from suburban Oregon can save us.
If you're wondering why that
sounds like the plot of a hundred sci-fi movies and TV shows over the
years, you're not alone. Zack Lightman, high school senior and
unlikely savior, wonders it, too, to the point that he almost can't
take the threat seriously. The planet is neck-deep in trouble, to be
sure...but why is the impending really real-world assault – and
certain extinction event to follow – playing out so much like an
old episode of Star Trek? For that matter, why are the aliens
behaving like the classic dumb bad guys, giving the heroes ample
opportunity to fight back when they could just as well – as Ellen
Ripley might suggest – nuke us from orbit (it's the only way to be
sure)? It is a eyebrow-tenter of a mystery that teases playfully at
the edges of Armada, Ernest Cline's second novel, and keeps
the intrigue on slow burn for what is otherwise a wall-to-wall alien
action tale. Cline's sophomore effort doesn't quite reach the
bar set by the first book, but we can hardly blame him for that given
the stratospheric standard he set for himself.
Cline burst on the scene –
and the New York Times Bestseller List – a few years ago with his
sensational debut novel Ready Player One, an uber-geek's wet
dream brought to life with a heavy dash of wistfulness for the Reagan
era. It was also, as luck would have it, damn well written.
Though its appeal stemmed from a hip take a classic hero's journey,
the nucleus of the tale was something to which all bookish introverts
can relate: escapism, spontaneous reinvention, and breaking out of
life's cruelly narrow molds to sate that supernatural craving for
adventure just beneath the surface. Cline, a child of the 80's
raised on pizza parlor arcades and pre-CGI fantasy, makes no bones
about creating heroes that are thinly-veiled versions of his younger
self: book smart but socially stunted, meek, slightly self-loathing,
great at video games, unfit for cliques save a perhaps a
basement-based D&D club, and generally nursing a grudge with
Things The Way They Are. Armada is no different, and like
Wade Wells, the likeable hero of Ready Player One, Zack is
suddenly and unaccountably handed an epic adventure that allows him
to realize all his deepest yearnings – for good or ill. Once again
there is a heavy draw on the 80's for inspiration, with a plethora of
references to popular culture of the era, movies, TV, music, and a
topic in which I'm convinced Cline would have a doctorate if
such a thing existed, classic video games.
Zack Lightman – there's a
reference right there, for you War Games fans – finds his
boring life in Beaverton, Oregon suddenly turning weird when he spots
a UFO hovering near his high school. That's troubling enough, but
even more distressing is that the ship is identical to the alien foes
of his favorite video game, Armada, a sci-fi aerial combat
simulator. What might be dismissed as a stress-induced daydream by
most is not so easily cast aside by Zack, who fears he might have
inherited a penchant for delusion from his long-dead father. Zack's
Dad was the 80's child this time, a Cline-like caricature, and before
he died under mysterious circumstances he filled a few dozen
notebooks with paranoid screeds about the government monitoring
gamers throughout the world and allowing the film and TV industries
to seed our culture with references to alien invasion. It all seems a
demented fantasy...until Zack is recruited by a shadowy government
agency that confirms his father was on the right track. Aliens are
real, and they're really invading, and its up to every man and
woman and pimply teen to take the fight to them. Thank God the
worldwide sensation video game Armada was actually a
cleverly-disguised training simulator...and Zack just happens to be
the sixth-best pilot in the entire world.
The book unfolds at a breakneck
pace from there, whisking us through the events of a decades-long
fight with an implacable alien foe, a cover-up perpetuated by some
of the world's greatest (and most famous) scientists, and a global
effort to harness the geektastic skills of nerds and introverts
everywhere for a desperate defense of Earth. Zack leapfrogs from one
jaw-dropper of a revelation to another until he can no longer be
certain of anything but his trigger finger, inevitably – and yes,
predictably – finding himself the lynchpin of humanity's salvation.
And in the great tradition of getting more than he bargained for, he
discovers his life prior to the alien death force wasn't really all
that terrible...even as he can't shake the sense that everything
playing out before him seems a bit too convenient. The action is
frequent and furious, but every time the story threatens to veer into
a tad too much Top Gun – and it veers dangerously close a
couple of times – Cline teases our puzzle bone with more nuggets of
the alien's true motives and the sordid timeline of humanity's first
contact with the other-worldly intelligence. Hint: it happened
during the Nixon administration, so nothing could've possibly gone
wrong with that.
One of the greatest strengths
of Ready Player One was its pacing. Cline took extraordinary
pains to meticulously plot his story, creating an airtight universe
where not a drop of narrative mojo escaped (an observation that stood
up to a second read from Yours Truly). Wade's journey is a patient
one, taking well over a year to reach fruition, and the final act and
action-packed climax plays out like brilliantly-crafted battle plan.
Armada by comparison seems a bit rushed, as
though Cline gave himself less time on the front end to hash out the
details and (perhaps) suffered deadline fatigue on the back end to
boot. A couple tantalizing threads laid out early on are abandoned,
which wouldn't have been as frustrating if they hadn't been so
intriguing. The last 50 pages fall together so fast they seem manic,
and are only saved by Cline's clean, pragmatic style of writing and
his (admittedly enviable) penchant for cinema-worthy reversals and
sudden 'oh, crap!' moments. Indeed, a cynical reader might even
think Cline stages his books in an unavoidably cinematic
fashion, the better to get his stories optioned for big-budget film
adaptations. An unworthy and mercenary suggestion, and I do not –
let me be clear, do NOT – mean to suggest Cline is guilty of
ulterior motives. But at the time of my writing this, a film version
of Ready Player One is currently in pre-production, helmed by
none other than Steven Spielberg himself. Geeks everywhere would
kill for the honor.
Cline loves his tropes, and if
you do, too, you'll find plenty to love in Armada. Many of
the best-realized conventions from his first novel (themselves tropes
from the movies and TV shows from which he drew inspiration) are
reincarnated here – the Yoda-like mentor, the badgirl love
interest, the geek sidekicks forever squabbling over comic book
minutiae - but they, too, feel a tad shoehorned this time, with no
element shining forth as fresh or as pure as they did the first time
around. One can't help but notice there's an aspect of meta-fiction
at work here, with Cline's heroes expounding at nearly every chapter
on the idiomatic elements found in genre fiction while he himself is
writing a book chock full of such things, tossing his hero into one
'classic' scenario after another with outcomes about on par with what
we've been conditioned to expect. It's up to the reader to decide
just how self-aware Cline is being with this approach, whether he's
being at least partially ironic in his presentation, or whether (my
take) he's having the time of his life writing stories that are just
like the ones on which he was raised and not presuming to improve on
perfection. There remains a very respectable attention to detail
here, with oodles of half-formed questions conveniently and
satisfyingly answered almost the moment they form in our heads.
That's a sure sign Cline understands his audience, and though there's
less here for the 80's children to love, there's still a strong, and
very universal, appeal to the frustrated loser in all of us yearning
to be something more.
