join the Armada.

Honestly, we voraciously dove into Ernest Cline's new novel Armada (2015) in the sincere belief that it would be an even more awesome sequel to his 1980s inspired videogamepunked Ready Player One (2011).



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the author's written the same book, or maybe suspect it was the version he didn't use, or even posit that it was an unpublished earlier novel.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+.

are you Ready, Player One?

The '80s were the last macrocultural zeitgeist.



After that it all fragments with the media's pronounced non-objective political divisiveness and the internet making endless forum & chat room for every myopic splinter interest, as we went from one shared page where everyone wondered about the same things: whether Coke or Pepsi was better, if Prince or Michael Jackson reigned supreme, what exactly's up with those Goth kids, or when the nukes would drop and justify our unassailable doomsday existentialism. After the web's technological expansion there was no way to keep track of it all, nor at that point would anyone want or even need to.



As such the 1980s will always be relevant.



Which brings us to Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One", an unapologetic 374-page lovesong to the last true pop cultural monolith that is the 1980s.

[Sweet foreign language Tron-inspired cover!]

Sack up, gunter*: Say Bill Gates or Steve Jobs dies/died, themselves competitive ego-products of 1980s greed-is-good corporate raider materialism, and instead of leaving their tech-legacies to friends or family or shareholders, decided to posthumously announce an internet-based contest within the virtual reality network they'd created, allowing the winner not only their personal fortunes of nigh-bottomless billions, but executive ownership of the whole internet itself. Essentially that's the high stakes plot of this near future 2041 cyberpunk modern masterwork.



Unlike most cyberpunk however, instead of grasping forward, Cline's virtual world frames its goggle-net in the rear-view mirror of Tom Cruise's Porsche 928, or Michael J Fox's DeLorean DMC-12: the 1980s context that not only sets our world's watershed reference points for the last agreed upon books, movies, music, and videogames, but the very same earmarks become possibly important clues for the greatest treasure hunt ever devised by a man who grew up in the '80s who was enamoured of all its facets. The conceit sounds like a writer's cop-out, but if you think about it of course we as users would want proverbial lightsabers, or sling a second-gen phaser from our spandexed space-uni hip, smoke the street comp in that unattainable Vector, sport a fierce "Lost Boys" jacket, or rad awesome big teased hair from "Square Pegs". They would pick these, and Cline takes us into the most bitchin' shopping mall of our collective media past with credit cards at the ready, going "Oh yeah! I sooooo wanted that!"



And I can't get over this book. It's so nerd geek gamer retro-wonderful, and payloads John Hughes teen brat pack films, half-remembered TV shows, nascent hacker empowerment ethos, kaiju cinema, classic Star Wars, Saturday morning cartoons, New Wave, Synthpop, hair metal, 8-bit, Radio Shack hardware and so much more into an intellectual atomic bomb signifier that completely levels the irrelevant house of "postmodernism"'s cards into the valueless joke it really is. All the things we have affection for become invaluable, and everything in its way is a miracle we can share, celebrate with each other, and, even more importantly, can be the things we can grow ourselves from, and inspire us to transcend.



Of course there's villainy ex machina and, as with any contest, loopholes & hacks to be had, so Cline builds the tension up, and the seemingly impossible search pulls his world's contestants, and the readers with them, in, trying just as hard to figure out where the clues are hidden.



Good sci-fi tends to be prescient in that egg/chicken, causal/predictive way. Just look at Verne (submarines), Dick (cloning), and Gibson (cyberspace). As we browse right now, convergence technology's busy combining networks down to smaller numbers with more features, whether that's Sony's liberal PS4 over Microsoft's over-regulated Xbox One next-gen consoles, sync service focused Windows 8.1, or multi-app A.I. driven smartphones, all vying to be the preferred user device. It's not too far off to imagine that the world wide web, the cloud, mobile networks, online gaming and video conferencing could also umbrella into one single shared virtual user interface. Recently Cline went and tried out the Oculus VR, deeming their device the looking glass step into his book's OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), the novel's world changing virtual reality.



Cline reveres the tools of technology and the things it can manifest, but indulges in a couple small humanizing moments to remind us not to lose ourselves socially & psychologically within the artifice (albeit pretty hollowly by comparison to the digital grandeur of the brilliant technostalgic world he posits, but point taken). And at the end Cline asks if we are ready to play on this newfound virtual grid where anything is possible, and if so, by whose rules? Will it be by an authority that will limit those possibilities, or by our independent selves with our shared media heritage & no limits save the potential of our imaginations? Either way, Cline's vision is coming. Are you Ready, Player One?

[*Gunter: Easter Egg Hunter]

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+.