While that expectation turned out to be wrong (rats!), Cline's literary coding runs a similar program. If one hadn't already read RP1, we'd be introduced to the same precocious classroom prisoner, the hero of all YA, a kid with issues, a too-cool-for-school geek girl love interest, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that perhaps is more than it seems, and mad gaming skillz that just happen to turn a young nobody into a hero.
References abound to John Hughes, Conan, Dune, The Twilight Zone, and of course the twin pillars of sci-fi fandom, Star Trek & Star Wars, keeping the dialogue witty and the prose retro-pop fun to read. There's even some guided playlist cassette culture mixtape love, if you actually wanted to soundtrack your reading experience at certain points of the story.
For his second novel, Cline's produced a winning ode in the key of space opera, a homage rewritten from Ender's Game (1985) & "The Last Starfighter" (1984), except set in the very near future, and with far higher stakes than RP1. High school gamer Zack Lightman one day sees a UFO hovering about his small hometown. Weird enough, but the cognitive dissonance is that it's straight out of his favourite game, "Armada", and after discovering his late father's secret journal full of paranoid notes, Zack questions his sanity and wonders if he should lay off the console until his head clears up.
At points the text reads like the best bits of MMORPG flight & ground future combat sims, so if you ever cockpit jocked dogfights in the classic "TIE Fighter Vs. X-Wing" PC game, it'll be especially delightful reading these white knuckle on joystick Earth Defense Alliance passages.
The winning characters elevate this book above a skeletal space action novel with it's central sins of the father-son dynamic, hilarious besties, compassionate mother, all in the shadow of a possible doomsday scenario.
In the inevitable comparison to RP1 many will complain the author's written the same book, or maybe suspect it was the version he didn't use, or even posit that it was an unpublished earlier novel. Yet others would've complained even more if he'd decided to instead write a cheese eating paranormal romance YA novel, a scandi noir pastiche, or something equally divergent instead.
Ernest Cline writes what he knows & loves, sci-fi fandom-inspired prose from the heart, and that honest center is what makes his writing shine. Woven around that, Armada's a mosaic of cult book & film & graphic novel sources, scripture, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and other winning DNA.
And it's more clever than mere adulation as it's a metaliterary "The Cabin In The Woods" (2012)-style examination of alien invasion scenarios. In doing this, however, the twist truncates the end into a Childhood's End (1953) a la Arthur C. Clarke that would seem less of a denouement than one might have expected after all the intensity. We'll see if the upcoming Universal Pictures version sticks with it.
At the end of the day it seems Cline again wants us to find the depth and life-in-art meaning in the medium that is the videogame: One can apply game theory to life, but it's too emotionally deep to pixelate it down into such a coded reduction. It means more than clearing a level or topping a high score, and you don't get three lives for a quarter, you only get one chance. By all means play, but play it like you mean it.
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
