Review: Armada
My rating: [rating=3]
Blurb:
Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. 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. 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.
But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. 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.
Even 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.
No, Zack hasn’t lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he’s seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what’s about to befall it.
It’s Zack’s chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can’t help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: Doesn’t something about this scenario seem a little…familiar?
Review:
[I received a copy of this novel through NetGalley and Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.]
I loved Ready Player One by the same author, and I was rather worried about this one: reviews were extremely mixed, and I kept wondering whether I’d like it or not. In the end, while I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did RPO, I still managed to like it. Which doesn’t mean it’s not without faults. Basically, for me, this was all a constant game of “good!” and “but…!”.
Armada plays with a lot of tropes, from beginning to end. The video games-addicted kid living in the memory of a father he never knew, and who suddenly finds himself an ace in a top-secret military organisation where his gamer skills are of the utmost importance. Games used as training (more about this later). The hot gamer/hacker chick. A handful of mavericks saving the world. Faceless aliens threatening humanity. The same aliens’ strategy resembling so much that of a video game.
The downside is that, in a way, the novel also feels like some kind of wish-fulfilment, and this always tends to ring a bit silly. Unless this is another subverted trope? It’s difficult to tell. Another issue may be the way the novel ties into specific works, namely Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card . Although I didn’t read it, I know enough to see the links, and the same goes with movies mentioned along the way. It’s acknowledged in Armada, but I can’t make up my mind whether it’s homage or “borrowing too much”, so to speak. And then, there are all those “geek culture” references that are OK for a while, yet become burdensome in the end. They were more justified in RPO, because of the nature of the game itself and the hints the players had to decipher; here, they tether between “hey, funny”, “I don’t get it” and “you didn’t need to explain that”. (In other words, the balance is very thin between references readers may miss, references that are understandable and in the right places, and references that are likely to make one roll their eyes.)
The story itself could’ve been more original; on the other hand, it could also have been *less* original. All in all, it was interesting along the pattern it followed, if you like such patterns. Good call on some characters’ part to wonder about the aliens’ real goal. Also, the stakes are real. People do die in this book. The invasion leaves destruction in its wake, and the gamers have to quickly wake up and realise it’s not a joke, it’s not a game anymore. The way they’re quickly thrown into this new reality, brought to this realisation, was a “good” thing, as it made the threat more real. But! At the same time, the twists were fairly predictable. Or was it on purpose, to fit into the mould of tropey alien invasion stories?
Speaking of the characters: likeable enough, but nothing to write home about. Zack was probably too serious for his age, and the others didn’t left much of an impression. Nice and forgettable. I wish I could’ve gotten to know them better, see more of them, as it would have made more of an impact when X or Y got into trouble during a fight against the aliens, and so on. (And yet, again, I have to wonder: isn’t this also part of the private jokes contained in the novel—a bit like red shirts? Tricky, I tell you!)
2.5-3 stars, in the end, to even out things between all these “buts”. I didn’t dislike it, *but* I didn’t love it the way I had expected to. It had good ideas, *but* were they homage, playing on tropes, or just using existing works to build without too much effort? The characters were likeable, *but* very cardboard-like too. And so on. You get my drift…