Armada by Ernest Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ernest Cline’s second book is about Zack Lightman, a high school kid with a talent for video games in general and an anger management problem. He’s a pretty normal kid until he sees an alien spacecraft right out of his favorite game lurking around the skies of his hometown. Then everything changes.

It’s not a new idea: what if video games are some kind of training for interstellar battle. Cline is pretty clear that it’s a recycled idea within the narrative, but he develops and refines it. He wraps earlier cinema and games into an elaborate conspiracy theory and then makes it all real. In some ways it is a similar technique to Ready Player One which read like 1980’s retrospective on pop culture.

It was a good read but there is something about Cline’s writing style that makes it hard to immerse in. I haven’t quite figured out what the problem is, but I find that I can only read a chapter or two at a time no matter how much I might be enjoying it which is odd for me. I tend to persevere because many of my students are a fan of Cline and I’m generally glad that I kept at it by the end.


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