Hello ladies, enbies and gentlemen.
Recently I finished reading Armada by Ernest Cline, best known as the author of ‘Ready Player One’, which I have to admit I’ve yet to read.
To give a fairly spoiler free overview of this novel, it’s the story of a teenager named Zack Lightman, a video game and science fiction addict who one day spots a spaceship from his favourite videogame Armada in the sky.
Upon sighting this ship (a Sobrukai Glaive fighter), Zack ponders if he is losing his mind or if his father’s conspiracy theories about video games and science fiction movies might have had some truth to them.
At times, reading Armada feels a bit like reading a movie, not least because this book has its own soundtrack in the form of Zack’s father’s ‘Raid The Arcade’ mixtape, the tracklisting of which is conveniently given to us at the end of the book.
‘Raid The Arcade’ is very much up your street if you like your rock classic eg. Pink Floyd, Queen, Van Halen, AC/DC etc. and a couple of kindly souls have put this playlist together on Youtube for those of us who wish to immerse ourselves in the world of ‘Armada’.
The way this story is set up, it allows Cline to both indulge in science fiction cliches, but also to be thoroughly critical of them, giving us the best of both worlds.
‘Armada’ has been criticised by other reviewers for borrowing more than a little from other science fiction stories, but given the nature of the story, I find this to be forgivable as it is afterall supposed to be a book about fans of science fiction and the notion that their favourite movies and video games and so on might be real.
The ever recurring references to movies and TV shows such as Star Wars, The Last Starfighter and Battlestar Galactica are another way in which reading ‘Armada’ can often feel like reading a movie.
Another notable feature of ‘Armada’ is that it includes cameos from various esteemed figures from the scientific world, though I won’t say who in the name of keeping this review spoiler free.
In my opinion, ’Armada’ achieves the feat of blending the far-fetched with the plausible and the serious with the silly.
The dustjacket provides us with some nice artwork detailing the schematics of an ADI-88 interceptor, which bears resemblance to both the starfighters from ‘Buck Rogers In The 25th Century’ and to X-wing fighters from Star Wars.
I get the impression that ‘Armada’ is a book aimed at fans of video games and/or science fiction as it very much turns the idea that such things are a waste of time on its head.
Personally, I haven’t been a gamer in any meaningful sense since the 1990s, however I’ve been a science fiction fan from childhood to the present day and I was able to enjoy this book without getting too lost in any of the video game lingo.
In conclusion, I’d recommend ‘Armada’ to fans of video games and/or science fiction and/or classic rock, but perhaps not so much to people with little to no grasp of such things.
Captain Andy 