Review: Armada, by Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline followed up the success of Ready Player One with Armada, in which he clearly meant to produce another work of the same kind without too ostentatiously repeating himself. And so once more we receive a young adult novel about an IRL loser who goes on a virtual action-adventure that might change everything for him, and everyone else, drenched in '80s geek culture nostalgia-flavored pop cultural references (often, the same references), our hero's useless knowledge about which actually proves helpful to him and the rest of the good guys.

Still, he takes considerable pains to differentiate the assembly of those elements. Instead of an ill-treated, impoverished orphan in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, the protagonist, Zack Lightman, is a present-day suburban kid raised by a loving mother who, despite being a single parent working as a nurse, and cut off from her own family, is well enough off that he doesn't have to worry about paying for college; while he identifies closely with his deceased father, the mystery of whose death obsesses him, and proves central to the story's course.1 (It seems that dad might have been onto something, just before he lost him . . .) Zack is also not the overweight, virginal social outcast of the first book. He has real-life friends, and has even had a girlfriend with whom he has been intimate. (No wondering if doing it with a robot counts as a first time, here.) Instead of a struggle of the little guy against corporate power it is humanity vs. the aliens, and rather than a scavenger hunt across a virtual world, he, and all of us, prove to have been fighting in the real world all along.

As one might guess from what has been changed, and how it has been changed, and the fact that Armada appeared in 2015 rather than 2011, Armada is the product of what, at least to go by what one saw in the mainstream, was a more complacent time, with the recession declared officially over, and the public shrugging off the energy shock--and a complacent book.2 Discovering what was really going on Zack thinks to himself that humanity's seeming disregard for all its grave environmental problems--the exhaustion of the fossil fuel supplies, the wrecking of the climate and the rest--was not self-destructiveness after all, but the necessary price of a grand plan to meet an alien menace, and considering it declares that it "filled me with a strange new sense of pride in my own species." (I repeat: forty years of neoliberal-neoconservative-postmodernist disaster and all the grief and despair they have wrought were really just us getting those nasty aliens right where we wanted them!3 The irresponsibility of making such a claim at a moment like this cannot be overstated.)

As one might guess from all this, too, it is also a less original work, with the premise making for a less fluid integration of pop cultural homage and action-adventure. Ready Player One's mix of nostalgia and adventure was rooted in the reality that its quest was a monument to its maker's obsessions. There is an extent to which such nostalgia is connected with the mystery of his father's passing, and what he became part of, but this is not a puzzle the hero puts together significantly, but rather a collection of clues that remain as just clues until others reveal the truth to him, and which become quickly overshadowed by that other, far bigger mystery--"Just what do the aliens want?" In all that it seems less evocative of its pop cultural references than derivative of them (not least, Wargames and The Last Starfighter), while the freighting of the dialogue with generally more obvious references making it sound like a geekier version of the writing for Gilmore Girls, and no less grating (at perhaps its most painful in the first meeting of Zack and Alex).

Alas, even on an action-adventure level it did not quite equal the first. While Armada's space battles are consistently well-written, fast-paced, dense, coherent, the elements of them seem generic rather than evocative, nothing coming close to the wacky extravagance of the climax of Ready Player One; or its intensity, the more so because of the enemy's facelessness, and the point made early on that it was not all as it seemed, which made it clear to me that this was not really going to be settled by fighting. Indeed, reading the battle comprising the last quarter of the book I was simply impatient for the story to get on with the explanation of what that was instead.

Ultimately the answers Zack gets raise still more questions, opening the door to a sequel. A story that followed Zack's pursuit of their answers has its potential, but I suspect that making it really work--making it ascend above the serviceable but generally generic book he produced this time around--will not be easily reconcilable with a desire to give the reader more Ready Player One. Perhaps it is for that reason that a direct sequel to his 2011 hit is reportedly what we can next expect from Cline.

1. Yes, the protagonist was named after the hero of Wargames, because apparently Cline didn't give us enough of it the last time, and yes, this is not wholly irrelevant given the decision that has to be made at the climax.
2. Alas, watching politics grow increasingly radicalized in the three years since, it is clearer than ever that the complacency was a luxury of the privileged and sheltered.
3. This aspect of the story was a reminder that, despite Ready Player One's post-energy shock, post-Great Recession angst and appeal to the masses against a corporate villain, it was not a sophisticated political critique, actually being quite conventional and conformist in many a respect, not least in the biography of James Halliday. In the early '80s fewer than a tenth of American households had personal computers. That the son of a machine operator and a waitress had one, and so many other of the day's electronic goodies, is not impossible, but certainly less common than one might think. That a kid from a blue collar Rust Belt family, while still far from the tech hubs of the day, without social connections or capital or even a high school education, managed to launch a gaming empire at that relatively late date (this is long past the moment when Gates and Jobs were getting their start), is little more than the fantasy of tech-entrepreneurship so beloved of libertarians and their fellow travelers pushed to its outermost limit--pure right-wing economic propaganda.