In Ernest Cline’s novel, “Armada” the world is at stake, and its greatest defenders are nerds who spend all day on their computers. What a fantasy. As someone who has spent probably years of his life gaming and practicing my crack millisecond responses and snap judgements, I wish an opportunity arose like one described in the book. Is one of the smash success video games secretly funded by a government organization setup in the 70’s to protect the planet against an alien threat? Probably not, but wow would that be fun.
Our hero, Zackary Lightman, son of Xavier Lightman and Pamela Lightman, is an 18-year-old new-adult who has spent the last several years playing an Massively Multiplayer Online video game flight-simulator called “Armada”. After seeing an enemy “glaive-fighter” outside his school window he rushes home to avoid a mental breakdown. He works that afternoon at a second-hand video game/tech retail store. Strangely, his boss gifts him a brand new flight control/vr setup developed by the Armada developers. He uses this in his fight that night on Armada. The story in the game is that the Earth Defense Alliance, the fictional government organization mentioned in the previous paragraph, has sent a doomsday weapon against the enemy species, known in the game as the “Sobrukai”. They intend to wipe out the aliens before they can send a doomsday fleet against the earth and wipe out humanity. This mission ultimately fails. The next day on his way into school Zack is recruited publicly by the EDA who turn out to be a real organization. It is revealed to Zack that his years of fighting in the sim have been training for the real war against the Europans. A supposed alien race that exists under the ice continents of Jupiter’s Moon Europa. After Zack fights for his life in his first real-world battle against the alien drone forces. He is assigned to the moon under the command of General Xavier Lightman, his long-thought dead father. None of it seems right, though. Something about this whole thing is wrong. Will Zack and his father uncover the truth in time to save their species? Will humanity win the war? Was a simulated game where you fight simulated drones enough training for the fight of our lives? Find out in Armada today!
The story as a whole is rather compelling. Especially in a culture where many young men grew up without a father. This speaks to a similar fantasy that Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians did when it first came out. Those youths who grew up without one or more parent could take solace in or feel solidarity with Percy’s plight as the son of a Single mother with an abusive or dysfunctional system. The hope given in Armada is that Zack’s father turns out to not be dead at all, rather when the hero was born, a few months later his father was conscripted into the Earth Defense Alliance. He lived those 18 years apart from his family who thought he was dead.
My problems with this story begin when they introduce the diverse cast of the other top-ten flyers in Armada. The leaderboards of the video game put Zack, known in the game as “Iron Beagle”, at number six in the world. The Three best were his father, and the two men stationed on the moon with his father. Number four was Admiral Vance, and number five was a young kid. All of those selections I have no problem with. Prodigies are a great trope for systems like this, and the other top flyers all being military personnel also works as their whole job is to be the best they can possibly be at this one thing, the flight sim. My problem starts at the number six slot and continues down to the number ten. While Whoadie and Atomicmom are my main contrivances. Outside of the fact that Zack, a high-school kid, probably shouldn’t be near the top ten, these two admittedly confuse me.
The only two recorded female flying aces in history are Lydia Litvyak and Yekaterina Budanova, both Russian flyers in World War 2. Not only are neither Whoadie or Atomicmom Russian, one of them is a WHOLE MOTHER and a devout Christian on top of everything else. In this PubMed Article they talk about the implications of the Sex Difference in reaction times of Olympic Sprinters. This supports the notion that men have faster reaction times than women. While they claim it is an artifact of using the same threshold of “false-starts” for both men and women, I disagree. We see in games the world over that women never, save for puzzle-games like Dr. Mario or a few examples in Tetris, outcompete men in the upper-echelon of their games. Look at League of Legends, Counter-Strike, and Call of Duty, for examples. Each of these require cracked reaction times and women always fall short of men in the best of the best. In his video on the subject, YouTuber “Think Before You Sleep” discussed women in competitive gaming. You can watch that video here. He talked about the League of Legends team Sirens and several other instances of women falling short or causing the collapse of a competitive team otherwise comprised of men, such as instances in EA’s Apex Legends. According to HLTV’s Counter-Strike Player Statistics all ten of the world’s top ten Counter-Strike Players are men. “Okay,” I hear you say, “but none of those are flight-sim games like Armada.” Good point. Except the counter-point to that is just another google search away. The Flight-sim combat game, “IL-2 Sturmovik” maintains a career ranking system and there are no women in the top 25, and I only say “25” because that’s when I stopped scrolling. You can see the rankings for yourself here.
My point in all of this is not to say that women can’t or that women shouldn’t do this or that. My point is this: as authors we should pursue a level of realism in our fantasy. I would also say that Ernest Cline does that in most of his work here in this book. The high-school that Zack is from is very realistic. The characters are very true to who they would likely be in real-life I thought, while reading, and the military/politics of the book are well done. However when Zack gets on his ship and there is a Feminist Girl-boss go-off moment between one of the three men in the bottom five of top ten and one of the two girls there, I physically cringed. It was like the author was predicting my very criticism and trying to get a head of it. It was outright laughable when the girl who was arguing claimed that the top player of the game, before we knew him to be Zack’s father, known on the leaderboard as “RedJive” could be a girl. There are plenty of ways Cline could have handled this better while also maintaining the women as elite fighters, probably. What they didn’t need was a Girl-boss go-off moment. Take Lex, Zack’s love-interest, she is part of the 30-Dozen an elite fighting core of 360 Drone Pilots in Armada’s sister-game, Terra Firma. She is still elite, but not the top 10.
Despite my criticism I am still going to give this book three and a half stars. The loss of the fifth star was for the political messaging and, in my view, shoehorned feminism. The half star lost was for the vulgarity of the book. While realistic I find it unnecessary. It will almost always cost a book at least half a star in my ranking. If you like Odyssey-like stories (all the way down to the dog!), or heroic adventures, or young love, and don’t mind vulgar young-adults, this story is a strong recommend. If you liked Ready Player One Ernest Cline’s other blockbuster novel-turned movie, you will likely enjoy this tale as well.
Armada by Ernest Cline, rating: