Armada

Armada
© 2015 Ernest Cline
368 pages

“Where are you going?” Cruz said over the comm. “Protect the Icebreaker, dumb ass!” 
“Sorry, Cruz!” I said, pushing my throttle forward. “But you’ll never guess who just showed up. Leeeeeeroyyy—”
 “Oh, Lightman, don’t you even dare!” 
“—mmm-Jenkinsss!”***

Zack Lightman thought he was going crazy. Not only was there an alien spacecraft hovering above his school, but it was a spacecraft from a video game. If he was going crazy, it was a special kind of crazy -- the kind of crazy that his long-dead father had gone, he being the man who built elaborate conspiracy theories that involved Men in Black creating Star Wars and raiding video arcades.   But Lightman wasn't going crazy.  Earth really was being invaded, and the aliens from his video games weren't fictional.

Armada is another fun SF novel from Ernest Cline, one with lots of science fiction and video game references, but not the sustained geekery, of Ready Player One. Lightman (and I went the entire novel before picking up on the Wargames reference in his name)'s first response to seeing the not-so-fictional alien spaceship is to swear off playing  Armada, the SF flight simulator he and his friends play together as they defend Earth from drones sent by squid-like aliens. But Armada turns out to have been a government-funded project to train unwitting civilians for a war they knew was coming.  While the truth is hard to believe, the voice of Carl Sagan -- who recorded the first announcement that  other life in the universe had been discovered,  who also warned that first contact had gone aly and Earth itself might be danger -- sways him over. With a little help from his friends, Lightman goes to war, playing his favorite game but for real this time. But...if it's real, why does it continue to feel....orchestrated? 

Take Ender's Game, mix evenly with Contact, with  a splash of Redshirts and you have a novel that definitely kept me entertained.  Armada is much lighter in its subject than Ready Player One, since no one really believes Earth will be destroyed by aliens. Imperiled, sure. At the end we may safely expect death and damage, particularly to landmarks and symbolic government buildings, but it's a rare author who actually destroys all life as we know it.  Ready Player One featured a real-world threat, that of a person losing themselves in fantasy to the expense of everything else, and it was one that wasn't resolved by the novel wrapping up. Armada is a much more straightforward adventure, with its own Ender's Game-like twist.



*** I hit the floor laughing at this scene. For the uninitiated,  in May 2005 a video was posted from World of Warcraft in which an elaborate multiplayer plan  was hilariously ruined by one player -- "LEEEEEEROOYYY JENKINS!" going rogue action hero on everyone.