Posted in: Games | Tagged: Armada, Ernie Cline, gaming, pop culture, ready player one, video games

Reviewing Armada, The Gamer-Geared Novel That Speaks Pop Culture

By Jason Henderson

Full disclosure: I am a fan and friend of this author, but I absolutely wouldn't put up a positive review if I didn't think a book merited it. Better to just keep your mouth shut if the book doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

What is Armada supposed to do, though? A lot: nothing short of overcoming the stratospheric hopes of readers who made Ernie Cline's premier book Ready Player One a success rarely seen in publishing. And set aside the expectations; this is a Cline book, so it's also supposed to represent the author's encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture of the latter half of the 20th and turn of the 21st centuries. That's a tall order, as anyone who's ever heard Cline's comedy album Ultraman is Airwolf can attest.

That's a lot of pressure. And so the drums roll and the book drops, a story of a teenager summoned in a world-threatening crisis to join a military organization that has been secretly training young people for years to be ready for an alien invasion, the grandest conspiracy of all time. So it drops and we ask, does Armada measure up?

Yes. Mainly because at the bottom of it– below the flash of deep genre knowledge and the ability to summon up references to references in every paragraph, Cline is an old-school talented writer who knows how to create tension and drive a plot. He can write; the rest is icing.

I have my own favorite moments. There are scenes reminiscent of the shimmering excitement found in the original Star Wars, not the moments everyone thinks of, but those giddy minutes when Luke and the other fresh X-Wing pilots scurry around the hangar, readying their ships and wearing their uniforms into combat for the first time. I also really love the thinking the main character does, the constant analysis of the plot behind the plot, all the possible ramifications. He's as smart as he is skilled.

Everyone in Armada, thanks to a global plan of sorts, speaks pop culture. Just like you and me, but there's a point. But this means everything has a pop culture phrase, term, memory, or image that flits through everyone's mind at the same time. So everyone knows what Yoda would say about a particular moment. Everyone knows Linda Hamilton. This sort of cultural literacy is in the DNA of the world of Armada, but it made me try to think if it would even be possible with any other literacy– perhaps a book about the Crusades or the Puritans, about zealots in the same religion might come close in shared ideology and symbols.

That's what Armada ultimately is: Cline is sneakily saying that we are not fans of pop culture at all. We are priests.

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