As impossible as it seems, what he’s seeing is all too real. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don’t get chosen to save the universe.And then he sees the flying saucer.Įven stranger, the alien ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada-in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure.īut hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality.
Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. The answer is no.Find it on the web: Buy from Amazon // Goodreads Date Completed: July 21, 2015 With Armada, Cline finally has the opportunity to address the question of whether his work has legs beyond the crutch of his referential obsessions.
The sins of Cline’s era-specific obsessions and wafer-thin characters were forgivable, given the effervescent pleasures of his geek-culture mashup. We’re told that he’s just immersing himself in the beloved media of his dead father, but hearing a modern-day teenage character talk about ’80s culture with the intimacy and nostalgia of his 43-year-old creator feels more than a little contrived.Īnd familiar: Ready Player One, the novel that launched Cline’s career, was a sci-fi adventure about teenagers cavorting through a futuristic virtual reality world where the limitless creative possibilities of the digital universe were oddly laser-focused on 1980s pop culture references. Armada reads like a coming-of-age fantasy for people who came of age long ago despite the fact that Zack Lightman is only 18 years old, he drives a 1989 Dodge Omni, watches ’80s movies like Say Anything, and can’t stop listening to ZZ Top.
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