South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Arizona. February 2018.
| "It's finally happening, Zack. The Call to Adventure you've been waiting for your whole life. It's standing right in front of you." — Ernest Cline, Armada |
Like his debut novel, Ready Player One, Ernest Cline’s second outing is chock full of more video game and sci-fi references as teenage nerd protagonist Zackary Ulysses Lightman fights to save the world from aliens. Him and the planet's worth of die-hard gamers, who, turns out, have actually been piloting real military spaceship drones against alien attack ships since the late eighties!
I love how again in Armada, Ernest Cline celebrates so much sci-fi and also pokes fun at and subverts certain clichés of the genre. It's a lighthearted space adventure that flew me to the moon and made me feel like a kid again. Although simpler in scope that RPO, I'm really excited to hear that this one will be getting its own movie too. [JG]
I love how again in Armada, Ernest Cline celebrates so much sci-fi and also pokes fun at and subverts certain clichés of the genre. It's a lighthearted space adventure that flew me to the moon and made me feel like a kid again. Although simpler in scope that RPO, I'm really excited to hear that this one will be getting its own movie too. [JG]
| Armada's hardcover version features an incredible dust jacket that's designed by Arms and Anchors. The inside shows a blue-print of an ADI-88 Interceptor, the drones that Zack and millions of fellow video game nerds pilot from earth on behalf of the Earth Defense Alliance. |
FAVORITE QUOTES
3. "It was an ATS-31 Aerospace Troop Shuttle, one of the ships used by the Earth Defense Alliance in both Armada and Terra Firma. And it was about to land in front of my high school."
2. "I wasn't a soldier. I was just a kid from the suburbs who played a shitload of video games. I wasn't prepared to fight an interplanetary war!"
1. "Directly below us was a large white ranch house flanked by several barns and outbuildings and a long row of tower grain silos topped with steel domes that glinted in the morning sun, like rockets waiting to be launched. The farm was surrounded on all sides by a vast sea of fields and rolling green hills and prairies, broken only by a single dirt road that snaked away across the northern horizon. I also spotted three other EDA shuttles drifting in the sky around us, all descending on a course similar to our own. As our shuttle continued its descent, the plowed field adjacent to the farm collapsed in on itself, like a perfectly rectangular sinkhole, then split in two and slid apart, like two massive elevator doors set into the earth."
2. "I wasn't a soldier. I was just a kid from the suburbs who played a shitload of video games. I wasn't prepared to fight an interplanetary war!"
1. "Directly below us was a large white ranch house flanked by several barns and outbuildings and a long row of tower grain silos topped with steel domes that glinted in the morning sun, like rockets waiting to be launched. The farm was surrounded on all sides by a vast sea of fields and rolling green hills and prairies, broken only by a single dirt road that snaked away across the northern horizon. I also spotted three other EDA shuttles drifting in the sky around us, all descending on a course similar to our own. As our shuttle continued its descent, the plowed field adjacent to the farm collapsed in on itself, like a perfectly rectangular sinkhole, then split in two and slid apart, like two massive elevator doors set into the earth."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Ready Player One is Ernest Cline's first novel. He also wrote the screenplay for the cult classic Fanboys. His second novel, Armada, a space-opera-coming-of-age tale which Rolling Stone eloquently called "Nerd-gasmic." Also, Earnie owns a tricked out Delorean with an Oscillation Overthruster that lets him travel through solid matter, sometimes accompanied by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. He lives in Austin with his wife, daughter, and "a huge video game collection." |
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 READY PLAYER ONE Ernest Cline  ANTHEM Ayn Rand |  SPHERE Michael Crichton  ANNIHILATION Jeff VanderMeer |
