“ they just come down and begin to conduct a World War II-style ground invasion against us, with ship-to-ship combat, because it’s all really great and cinematic and a lot like Star Wars. In most alien invasion stories, it’s like Independence Day, they’re not using drones, they’re putting real people in real ships to go down and die to try to take over the planet.” So I’d never seen that idea of drones sent to do an alien invasion. So now I watch any movie where somebody’s climbing into a ship to go into a dangerous-I mean, it makes sense for the movie, but does it make sense from a scientific standpoint? If you could make drones to do it, then you would use drones. You do not need to send Porkins down to die senselessly. If they can have real-time holographic phone calls between planets at faster-than-light speeds, that’s enough information clearly to make a remote-control X-Wing or TIE Fighter. “When I watch Star Wars now, I wonder why they aren’t using drones. Instead of doing drugs I was sneaking RPG supplements.” I remember sneaking my Dungeons & Dragons books in and out of the house under my jacket. That was part of the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons, it was almost like heavy metal and backmasking, this thing you’re not supposed to mess with, which made it even more appealing to me. And she thought the Player’s Handbook-you know, that had all those spells in the back-that I was really going to try to collect spell components and cast those spells, and that it was meddling with witchcraft, that I was meddling with powers I didn’t understand, all that. … And it was just fear-mongering about all the dangers of role-playing games. “It was forbidden, because my family was very religious, and my mother had gotten ahold of this book from someone at church called Playing with Fire. And check out some highlights from the discussion below. Listen to our complete interview with Ernie Cline in Episode 158 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above).
So it’s the fantasy of everyone in the world getting to use all their videogame skills.” “It’s such a natural idea,” says Cline, “because when you sit down and play a videogame, you want those videogame skills to have some sort of real-world value. It might be our only hope, and it would definitely be a blast. If aliens are real, we can only hope the government takes a page from Armada and constructs a fleet of Earth defense drones that we can pilot from our laptops and game consoles. “It completely discredits you, because it makes you seem like a nut.” “Then if you told the real story, people would say, ‘Oh, that’s just like Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'” says Cline. “I was ready to go fight aliens.”Īrmada also suggests that pieces of the truth are scattered throughout pop culture, an idea Cline credits to the movie Mirage Men, which suggests that the government created Close Encounters of the Third Kind in order to deflect suspicion from a similar event in real life. “If you’re a five-year-old kid, seeing Star Wars, there would be no better propaganda,” says Cline. It’s an idea he plays with in his new novel Armada, in which the government has known for decades of an alien invasion and has been funding sci-fi movies and videogames in order to prepare us for war. “We wouldn’t be prepared for it completely,” Cline says in Episode 158 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, “but we would have all these expectations based on forty or fifty years of War of the Worlds and V and Dark Skies and everything else.”