"How would you react to an alien invasion? Sci-fi writer Ernie Cline, author of Ready Player One, thinks the attack wouldn't come as that much of a shock, since decades of monster movies have gotten us used to the idea.
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."
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.
"If you're a five-year-old kid, seeing Star Wars, there would be no better propaganda," says Cline. "I was ready to go fight aliens."
Armada 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.
"Then if you told the real story, people would say, ‘Oh, that's just like Close Encounters of the Third Kind,'" says Cline. "It completely discredits you, because it makes you seem like a nut."
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 might be our only hope, and it would definitely be a blast.
"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. So it's the fantasy of everyone in the world getting to use all their videogame skills."..,"
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