Armada by Ernest Cline

I started off very excited to read Armada by Ernest Cline, because I so enjoyed his first novel, Ready Player One.  Ready Player One was clever, witty, had an interesting plot and was full of fun nerdy references.  I raced through that book a few years ago and it quickly became one of my favorites.  When I saw that Armada was on its way, I was ready for it to become another one of my top science fiction picks.  Imagine my disappointment to discover that that this one just didn't click for me.  It was merely okay.

Armada centers around Zack Lightman, a nerdy, modern-day high school senior who is obsessed with a space-themed video game called Armada.  Like many teenagers, he wishes that some exciting adventure would happen to him, just like something out of the science fiction movies and television shows he loves.  His wish is granted when he spots an actual alien ship from Armada flying around in the sky outside of his classroom window one afternoon.  It turns out that Armada was never just a popular video game--it was a government-created training simulation designed to prepare the public to help wage a war against an alien race that has been planning to invade earth since the 1970s.  As one of the top-ranked players of Armada, Zack is drafted into the Earth Defense Alliance and gets a chance to become a true hero and help save the earth.  However, the more Zack learns about his alien foes, the more illogical and suspicious the whole invasion scenario becomes.  Not everything is as it seems, and Zack must race get to the bottom of what's really going on.

The plot was fun, and I'm able to suspend my disbelief long enough to enjoy good sci-fi adventure, so what was my problem with Armada?  It all came down to the pacing for me.  The story takes place over the course of only two days (excluding the epilogue), and all of the real action takes place over the second day.  This means that all of the necessary exposition describing Zack's background, an alien invasion that has been in the planning stages since the 70s, and the massive government conspiracy enacted to hide that invasion and train the public to fight aliens has to be explained to the reader in extremely long sections that stop the action dead.  There is a real problem with the author "telling" instead of "showing" here, because the part of the novel that takes place in real time is so limited.  I would have preferred the novel to cover a longer period of time, so that Zack could discover information more organically.

Since everything is so rushed, character development is lacking.  We are told about some formative events in Zack's past, like the death of his father and a bad fight he got into with a classmate years ago, but since these events are described to us way after they occurred, they don't feel real.  At one point, Zack mentions that the "old Zack" would have reacted to something with rage, but now he is able to keep a cooler head.  He was referring to the fight he got into years ago, but I had to pause my reading and think about that a little bit to figure it out.  I had completely forgotten about the fight by that point in the novel since it was only mentioned briefly at the beginning of the story.  I never saw an "old Zack," so how could I feel like I was looking at a "new Zack"?

I also have to mention the science fiction references sprinkled throughout the novel.  There were numerous references to movies and television shows in Ready Player One, and I liked them then.  They were actually a part of the larger plot, so it felt like they fit into the story.  However, in Armada, the references are over the top and don't fit into the plot in the same way.  Almost every paragraph contained a reference to another science fiction story and it started to wear on me.  There were so many references to so many other stories that it didn't feel authentic.  It seemed like Cline was trying to jam as many inside jokes as possible into the novel and the overall effect was that it felt forced.  I know that I didn't catch them all either, because I haven't seen every nerdy property out there.  It was still way too much. 

Despite the issues that bugged me about this novel, there were some aspects that I enjoyed.  I was still interested in the story, and I wanted to see how everything turned out at the end.  Giving up on Armada entirely wasn't ever a consideration for me.  I also enjoyed a lot of the sarcastic lines and clever dialogue.  Cline is definitely very creative and funny, and at times, those parts of his writing really stood out.  There was a nice variety of characters of different genders and ethnicities too (although I do wish that Lex, the most prominent female character, had been in the story a little more).  Perhaps I would have enjoyed Armada more if Ready Player One hadn't come first and really knocked my socks off. 

In the end, Armada was only okay.  I feel very arrogant saying that, because honestly, I couldn't do better if I decided to sit down and write a novel.  Ernest Cline is a popular author, and rightfully so based on the success of Ready Player One.  Armada was voted to be one of the best science fiction books of the year on Goodreads.  I'm not sure what I'm missing here, but I can't help how I responded to the work.  Unfortunately, this one was not a favorite for me.