I was out of town when my book club read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, but I did listen to what they said afterwards. According to them, the book is filled with dozens of pop culture references, the main character is the worst example of a chosen one, and the side characters are stereotyped paper cut outs. The book was popular among people who were nostalgic for the 1980’s and who could remember all of the references. So after that I didn’t really want to read Armada, but when my mother read it, I decided to pick it up despite her warnings.
And yeah, all of Ready Player One’s criticisms apply to Armada too.
Our hero is Zack Ulysses Lightman, a high school senior who plays the titular video game Armada religiously. His long dead fathet left him a ton of 1980’s memorabilia (including a whole car) and a crazy theory stating that all of entire science fiction from Star Wars to Transformers was created in order to prepare humanity for an upcoming alien invasion. There are interesting routes from that starting point. Zach could learn more about his father while following his clues. He could have worked with his mother to prove his father right. He could have acted on this information. Instead he does nothing and an impossible ship lands in front of his school without him having to lift a finger.
Ernest Cline’s writing style is to shove in pop culture references where actual metaphor and emotional description should be, and the first quarter of the book is particularly rife with clumsy similes and awful nostalgia. For example, after seeing an alien ship hovering outside his classroom window, Zach returns home and, before going inside, states that “he felt like Luke Skywalker standing in front of the tree on Dagobah.” The first question I had was “what does that mean?”. Sure Luke was feeling anxious as his mentor had told him that he would find himself in the scary tree, but Zach was going home to his beautiful mother (Cline makes sure that we understand that). That’s just the one I could remember. Over and over again, Cline’s reliance on movie references forced me to put down the book multiple times and recovered from the whiplash. To be fair, there’s a style of writing that uses real world brands like Coca-cola and Toyota to add verisimilitude to writing, but people only occasionally communicate in brands. When Zach’s boss starts talking about his IPhone instead of just calling it a phone and when Zach keeps referring to his car by it’s full year and make, the constant calls to reality just wear me down. Luckily when the aliens attack, the pop culture references die down as story specific jargon (which are only sometimes 1980’s references) takes their place.
That’s not to say that pop culture references don’t have their place. There’s a cute moment when Zach’s mother imitates Gandalf and shouts “you shall not pass” in order to keep him from leaving. It’s something I can imagine my own mother doing, and it emphasizes how such things are used in the real world: to communicate complicated ideas with short hand. Unfortunately moments like that are undermined by Zach’s constant use of them, dulling the effect of the ones that really work. Of course then the characters would need to be filled out more. Once you remove the references from Zach, you’re left with a kid who has a dead dad, a lot of money (from the dead dad’s settlement), anger issues, and a lot of video game experience. The secondary characters are a little better.
I will give Cline some credit; he knows how to subvert expectations. The gamers in the novel are not all like Zach as there’s ethnic, gender, age, and queer diversity in there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it, though the novel was half over by the time they showed up. Each of these characters has the core of potential that’s wasted by how Cline uses them. Early on Zach points out a bully and his ex girlfriend. They are not important, just details that really add nothing to Zach. We’re introduced to Zach’s two best friends and a boss he really likes, but they are sidelined for the entire middle of the book in favor of a new romantic interest that the aforementioned diverse cast of gamers. It’s annoying because as one of the top ten players of Armada in the world, Zach should have been part of a pretty close knit community, but instead whole casts of characters are cycled in and out, making impossible to get attached to any of them. This extends to the romantic interest, who only shows up in the second quarter and then disappears for a quarter of the book and makes a cameo in the last few pages. She doesn’t drive the plot or sits at the emotional heart of the story where Zach’s father resides.
That leaves the plot. While the book opens with the question of whether or not Zach is going made, it decides that badly written Ender’s Game is what we wanted instead. It manages to up the tension with a pretty good video game action scene full of tension and excitement (it even explains the stakes pretty well), but it comes after a pointless day at school, a lecture from Zach’s mother, and a whole lot of pop culture references. By placing that scene first, the story’s stakes, tension, and theme would have come into focus a lot earlier and the heightened tension would have bought time for Zach to exposit his little heart out about his dad. The second quarter of the book is burdened with a pointless romantic subplot and way too much exposition that honestly was covered in the video game scene. More character interactions would have worked better here, giving Zach something to do while the main conflict ramps up, but sure a description of a video narrated by Carl Sagan works.
So those are my criticisms of Armada. I do not recommend it. I do recommend Skyward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyward_(novel)) by Brandon Sanderson, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and the X Wing series by Micheal Stackpole and Aaron Alliston. All those have tensions, space, aliens, and characters who feel like real human beings.
Admaeus Speaks 