Ernest Cline, writer of ‘Ready Player One’, shared the first chapter of his latest novel ‘Armada’ online.

‘Ready Player One’ is currently being adapted into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg. ‘Armada’, which will be available on July 14, has already been optioned.

In the same vein as ‘The Last Starfighter’ (which is referenced by the way), ‘Armada’ follows the story of Zack Lightman who spots a UFO that’s exactly the same as the one in his favorite videogame, Armada.

Here’s the official synopsis below:

With his new novel, ARMADA (Crown, on sale July 14, 2015), Cline has crafted another inventive, heartwarming, and completely nerdtastic adventure. As it opens, high school student Zack Lightman glances out his classroom window and spots a UFO. Stranger still, the ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting Earth from alien invaders.

Zack’s sure he’s lost his mind. But what he’s seeing is all too real, and his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save Earth from what’s about to befall it. Yet even as he and his new comrades scramble to prepare for the alien onslaught, Zack can’t help thinking of all the science-fiction books, TV shows, and movies he grew up reading and watching, and wonder: Doesn’t something about this scenario seem a little too… familiar?

ARMADA, which is already being adapted into a film by Universal Studios, is at once a rollicking, surprising thriller, a classic coming-of-age adventure, and an alien-invasion tale like nothing you’ve ever read before—one that manages to simultaneously embrace and subvert science-fiction tropes as only Ernest Cline could.

Here’s the Amazon link, and you can read an excerpt of the first chapter below with the entire first chapter available on io9.

1

I was staring out the classroom window and daydreaming of adventure when I spotted the flying saucer.

I blinked and looked again—but it was still out there, a shiny chrome disc zigzagging around in the sky. My eyes struggled to track the object through a series of increasingly fast, impossibly sharp turns that would have juiced a human being, had there been any aboard. The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an instantaneous stop just above it. It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line for a few seconds, as if scanning the area beneath it with an invisible beam, before it abruptly launched itself skyward again, making another series of physics defying changes to its course and speed.

I tried to keep my cool. I tried to remain skeptical. I reminded myself that I was a man of science, even if I did usually get a C in it.

I looked at it again. I still couldn’t tell what it was, but I knew what it wasn’t—it wasn’t a meteor. Or a weather balloon, or swamp gas, or ball lightning. No, the unidentified flying object I was staring at with my own two eyes was most definitely not of this earth.

My first thought was: Holy fucking shit.