Armada Chapter 10: Zack Explains The Book Explaining The Aliens

I just bought my copy of the new Harry Potter but can’t start reading it yet because I really should get this post done first. So if I seem extra angry at Armada today, that is probably part of the reason why.

Not Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Armada: Chapter 10

Sigh. Ok. Seriously. I’m ok. What’s today’s stupid chapter about?

Zack and the other new recruits are all watching the Earth Defense Alliance’s orientation video. It’s Armada, so of course it kicks off its own goddamned backstory with a name drop.

Lex and I both gasped in recognition, along with a chorus of others in the auditorium. We all recognized the voice instantly, even though its owner had been dead for nearly twenty years.
It was Carl Sagan.

I burst out laughing reading this line, which I’m pretty sure was not the intended effect. I dunno. There’s just something really goofy about how Armada refuses to try to stand on its own two feet, you know?

But here’s what’s worse about this infodump chapter. It’s pretty obvious by now that this is a silly, uncomplicated book, right? And nothing’s wrong with that! It can just be fun and a little goofy! But this isn’t really a book that requires considerable thought to follow, right? Well, Zack didn’t get this memo, and he spends the entire chapter explaining the entire chapter.

Sagan had been a driving force in humanity’s search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1960s. If NASA had discovered aliens back in 1973 and Sagan had helped conceal it from the world for the rest of his life, he must have had an incredibly compelling reason for doing so.

More on why this is “bad” later, because this is hardly the chapter’s worst example of it. Because he spends literally the entire chapter re-explaining what the book’s explaining to us. There is… oh, there is more to come…

The video explains that NASA discovered the first evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life in 1973 on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, during the Pioneer 10 mission. But, lo, it was not good news.

As the download approached completion and the rest of Europa’s surface gradually became visible […] When the last row of pixels formed and the complete image appeared on the monitor, it revealed that an enormous section of Eurpa’s icy surface was covered with a giant swastika.

They couldn’t have figured this out before the last row of pixels appeared? They had like 99% of a swastika but they were like, “Hang on, we can’t totally tell what this is yet. We still need the bottom sliver of this thing, dammit!”

“The discovery of this symbol was immediately recognized by NASA scientists as the first concrete evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence.”

The discovery of man-made iconography somewhere unexpected was the first concrete evidence that there’s something other than mankind out there?

“However, the excitement over this landmark discovery was eclipsed by the debate over the symbol’s potential meaning.” […]
“Yeah, why didn’t they slap a yin-yang symbol on Europa instead?” Lex whispered beside me, slurring her speech a bit. “That would’ve blown NASA’s mind.“

Uh… stock snarky love interest’s snarky commentary doesn’t even make sense. Sorry, Lex, your getting-included-in-this-chapter’s-summary privileges have just been revoked. Just chill.

Zack makes one useful contribution to the proceedings.

Carl Sagan himself had written a similar scenario into his first and only science fiction novel, Contact. In Sagan’s story, SETI researchers receive a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence that contains a copy of the first television broadcast from Earth the aliens ever intercepted, which turns out to be footage of Adolf Hitler’s opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

Wow, that sounds like a way better book than this one.

The video explains that the government decided to keep the information secret, fearing the news would result in global chaos. Zack explains that the video explains that the government decided to keep the information secret, fearing the news would result in global chaos.

Now I understood why Dr. Sagan and the other JPL scientists had gone along with the government’s cover-up.

Yeah, fucking so do we, Zack. Because we just read so.

The video goes on to explain that another probe was sent to Europa to explore the swastika and to search for signs of extraterrestrial life under the moon’s icy surface. However, it immediately goes awry when suddenly the swastika and the probe both disappear, but a message (in a child’s voice speaking in English! spooky!) is sent back on the probe’s frequency:

“You have desecrated our most sacred temple,” the child’s voice intoned in a flat, inflectionless tone. “For this there can be no forgiveness. We are coming to kill you all.” […]
It was like something out of a bad science fiction movie.

Self-awareness isn’t an excuse for shittiness, Armada.

“The Europans, as we began to refer to them, ignored all of our attempts to respond or explain our actions. For reasons we still don’t understand, it appears they viewed our first attempt to make contact with them as an unforgivable act of war. […] we may have unknowingly violated some territorial or religious boundary their species holds sacred. Or the Europans may simply view our species as a threat to their own. We still aren’t sure of their motivations” […]
I scanned the audience, half expecting someone to flip out, but everyone remained calm and in their seats— including me. The revelation that evil aliens were coming to try to wipe us out didn’t send anyone into hysterics or create a panic— and I thought I understood why. For decades, we had all been inundated with a steady barrage of science fiction novels, movies, cartoons, and television shows about aliens of one kind or another.

ZACK, THIS IS LITERALLY THE WHOLE BOOK. WE GET IT. SHUSH.

The video goes on to explain that the we still know basically nothing about the aliens’ physical appearance, but they’ve been building a massive drone army on Europa. They began sending scout ships to Earth in the mid-1980s, and humanity was able to capture and study a few of these and begin reverse-engineering the technology.

Gee, I wonder if Zack will tell the reader what they’re supposed to think about that.

I’d been willing to suspend my disbelief for the EDA’s “we reverse-engineered the aliens’ technology in just a few years” explanation back when I’d thought it was just a fictional videogame backstory. But I definitely didn’t buy it now that the EDA was trying to pass it off as a historical fact […]
Even if that was possible, why had our enemy made the task so easy for us? According to what we’d just been told, the Europans had not only let us capture several of their vessels, they’d then given us enough time to figure out how they worked, to build our own fleet of ships with the same capabilities. And by constructing their armada in orbit around their moon, in full view of our satellites, they’d basically given humanity a detailed video of what to expect when their attack came.
There had to be some truth to what the EDA was telling us.[…] I was sure there was more to this story than they were telling us. A lot more.

Well, here’s the short version of why this is shitty writing:

The slightly longer version is that, sure, it’s difficult to hint to the reader that things aren’t entirely what they seem. And Armada is almost there by having one of its characters serve as a conduit for these doubts. But Zack bluntly explaining his long, drawn-out questioning of the world doesn’t really make those doubts more show and less tell, does it?

What’s especially an issue about this is that Zack is constantly re-explaining everything to us. All the basic information in this chapter was retold, filtered through Zack, when it really didn’t need to be. So when the book suddenly wants to imply something might be awry, we already expect Zack to just tell us things about the book all the time. So he can’t hint anymore. Zack basically just told us, “Hey, there’s a plot twist.” So everybody get excited for a plot twist, I guess. My guess is that the aliens may not be what they seem to be???

Yeah. Whoa. I know. I’m pretty confident, though. Zack told us.