Wil Wheaton's brilliant reading of the audiobook almost tips this into 4 stars, but that is 100% for Wheaton's performance and not the actual source material. This is another homage to the 80s, geek-boy paean, this time starring high school senior Zackary Ulysses Lightman. Approaching graduation, his only skills appear to be computer games and 80s trivia; so how fortunate that the book's plot revolves around the not-very-surprising revelation that pop culture movies and computer games have actually been training the world to fight against an alien invasion since Nixon was in power. Now the aliens are finally making their final approach, the world and all the gamers in it mobilize to the defense using the skills they've been unwittingly honing by playing games.

Sounds like The Last Starfighter? Well, yes. The book even references it, unashamedly citing as another piece of the earth defense alliance's pop culture indoctrination to prepare the world to fight aliens. Think The Last Starfighter meets Ender's Game meets an episode of The Twilight Zone, or something along those lines. I suspect the writing was fairly average quality, but that's another advantage of listening to Wil Wheaton's excellent audio version.

Cline's books, at least thus far, are basically the science fiction equivalent of a tasty, crunchy bag of cheetos. They're junk food for readers, not at all good for you but still a guilty pleasure - at least if you can suspend critical thinking and just enjoy the ride. If you're looking for quality literature or can't suspend your inner critic, give this one a miss. But if you enjoy 80s trivia, computer game geeks, and many of the things Ready Player One also did ... you might like this. And, apparently it's already been optioned as a movie, so perhaps we'll see it on the big screen if Ready Player One does well.

At least Armada had more female characters than RPO, and some of them fairly kick ass at times. It's a small step forward! It would be nice to see if Cline can write any books that are NOT an 80s male gamer trivia fest though, his first two books are really enough to fill that market IMO.