Armada by Ernest Cline 

Genre: sci-fi

Setting: Portland, OR, United States, Earth, the solar system

I read it as a(n): audiobook

Narrator: Wil Wheaton

Source: my own collection 

Length: 11:50:00

Published by: Random House Audio (2015)

Her Grace’s rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Zack Lightman is super into gaming, in particular a game called Armada, which centers around an alien invasion of Earth. Players get to control various battle drones and ships to stave off the alien attack. So it is understandable that Zack thinks he’s losing his mind when he sees a spaceship exactly like those in Armada flying around outside his school window. But nope, the aliens are real and the game developers created the game, in tandem with an actual Earth Defense Alliance, to train millions of civilians to fight when the actual aliens arrive. Only of course it isn’t as straightforward as that. 

Zack has an anger problem because his father, Xavier, had died when Zack was just a baby. He died in a stupid accident at his job in a waste facility installation. He literally died getting blown up by human shit. That would cause most people some kind of angst, I would imagine. But he still managed to pass his love of gaming and 1980s pop culture to his son because Zack’s mother kept that part of her husband alive for him. His anger makes for a great gamer, though, and so when Zack learns the truth about the aliens and is recruited into the EDA, he jumps at the chance to defend Earth. 

So this book was ok but it was not nearly as good as Ready Player One. I found it to be entirely predictable. Entirely. Literally not one thing came as a surprise to me, there was no bated breath, no anxiety about what would happen, nothing. My granny could have written it, and she hates sci-fi (I’m not really sure how I’m related to her sometimes). I know the publisher’s blurb claims that it is intended to subvert a lot of sci-fi tropes. But I don’t think it did that. It basically just copied them (mostly from The Last Starfighter, Ender’s Game, and ET, from what I could tell) and provided nothing new to the genre, subversive or otherwise. I am quite disappointed since I really loved RP1 and had hoped Cline could pull this one off as well. But no. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it all that much either. Mostly I kept listening because I think Wil Wheaton did a great job narrating it, as he always does. I just didn’t care about the plot or the characters enough to truly love it. Which makes me sad because I am a geek and am always ready and excited to embrace any aspect of nerdom. Oh well. Can’t always roll 20, I guess.