Subtexts Ernest Cline reads from his latest sci-fi adventure tale, Armada, at the Jean Cocteau

WarGames 2.0:

Ernest Cline presents Armada Gamers rejoice! All that screen time may have actually trained you to fight off hordes of alien invaders who are hovering, in their UFOs, over your local high school. In Ernest Cline’s latest science-fiction adventure tale, Armada, the teenage Zack Lightman spots a UFO out the window of his math class, and then he and a band of like-minded gaming devotees save Earth from invasion, a battle for which they’ve been specifically prepared because, naturally, the alien airships are exactly like the ones from the fictional flightsimulator game Zack has been playing. The concept is not as far-fetched as it might sound: Science-fiction authors have a knack for predicting the future of technology — from Edward Bellamy’s 1888 foretelling of debit cards (Looking Backwards) to Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 conception of videoconferencing. Armada deals in quantum-data teleportation and 3-D drone printing, technologies that, according to Cline, were science fiction when he began the book and reality before he completed it. Armada also contains plenty of references to vintage sci-fi and video games, a strong father-son relationship, and a romantic subplot in which Zack falls for a girl gamer who saves him during an alien attack. Cline is the author of the wildly popular futuristic virtual-reality yarn, Ready Player One (Crown/Penguin Random House, 2011), now being made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. He owns a DeLorean that is a replica of the time-traveling car in the movie Back to the Future, which George R.R. Martin once borrowed from him to display in front of the Jean Cocteau Cinema during a revival screening of the Michael J. Fox classic. Cline reads from Armada at the Jean Cocteau (418 Montezuma Ave., 505-466-5528) at 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 17. Admission to the reading is $10 ($26 with the purchase of a paperback edition of Armada). For more information or to reserve tickets, visit www.jeancocteaucinema.com. — Jennifer Levin