Armada

Two stars...it was just okay.

I was hesitant to read Armada because the general consensus was that it wasn't as good as Ready Player One. I prepared myself for this fact and dived in when I was in between books.

The reviews don't lie. This is Enders Game with as many pop culture and nerd references as you can find. The first quarter of the book was a chore because every third sentence referenced this movie, this game or some obscure quote. I appreciated that I understood most of them but when I came across some I didn't immediately recognize I wasn't sure if this was a reference beyond my reach or just something the character was saying.

I'd been too busy having my whole perception of reality shattered into a million pieces. When the lights came up a few seconds later, they hit us with the really bad news.

The story was farfetched and unbelievable and if you accept that then the story is just easier to read. The whole book takes place over the course of a few days? Mean commander lets an insubordinate and reckless rookie off with a light tongue lashing? Secret conspiracy that only a few people believe? This is a light story with a simple plot and I was entertained for the week I read it.

I didn't need to understand complex political motives or unsaid actions between characters and that's fine. The references may have been a bit much, the ending was a bit too neat, but I was entertained for a week and that's what a book is for.

Who doesn't love E.T., I ask you?

Yeah, I don't love E.T.. I hate E.T.enough that I had to highlight this and say that E.T. traumatized me as a child and I can't tolerate anything related to E.T.. Being nine years old and watching People Under the Stairs wasn't a problem, being even younger and watching E.T. damaged me and I was afraid to go outside when there was partial moon at night. So, yeah, I don't love E.T..

After re-listening to the Ready Player One audiobook for the dozenth time, I figured let me give this one a go since I had it. I can say I liked it. But it is a strange mix of very similar to RP1, but very different. That's probably simply because there is a lot of pop culture as we are familiar with, albeit with more of a focus on sci-fi, video games definitely figure heavily in this one, but it all comes down to they are in real life today instead of a couple decades in the future, and there are real, honest to goodness aliens coming to destroy us and everyone needs to do something about it. In some ways, it was predictable... and yet, others, not so much. Like I said, I liked it, but don't see myself listening to it as many times as I have RP1 thus far. But it's still a good one to pick up and give a go if you liked the other book.

Wil Wheaton's brilliant reading of the audiobook almost tips this into 4 stars, but that is 100% for Wheaton's performance and not the actual source material. This is another homage to the 80s, geek-boy paean, this time starring high school senior Zackary Ulysses Lightman. Approaching graduation, his only skills appear to be computer games and 80s trivia; so how fortunate that the book's plot revolves around the not-very-surprising revelation that pop culture movies and computer games have actually been training the world to fight against an alien invasion since Nixon was in power. Now the aliens are finally making their final approach, the world and all the gamers in it mobilize to the defense using the skills they've been unwittingly honing by playing games.

Sounds like The Last Starfighter? Well, yes. The book even references it, unashamedly citing as another piece of the earth defense alliance's pop culture indoctrination to prepare the world to fight aliens. Think The Last Starfighter meets Ender's Game meets an episode of The Twilight Zone, or something along those lines. I suspect the writing was fairly average quality, but that's another advantage of listening to Wil Wheaton's excellent audio version.

Cline's books, at least thus far, are basically the science fiction equivalent of a tasty, crunchy bag of cheetos. They're junk food for readers, not at all good for you but still a guilty pleasure - at least if you can suspend critical thinking and just enjoy the ride. If you're looking for quality literature or can't suspend your inner critic, give this one a miss. But if you enjoy 80s trivia, computer game geeks, and many of the things Ready Player One also did ... you might like this. And, apparently it's already been optioned as a movie, so perhaps we'll see it on the big screen if Ready Player One does well.

At least Armada had more female characters than RPO, and some of them fairly kick ass at times. It's a small step forward! It would be nice to see if Cline can write any books that are NOT an 80s male gamer trivia fest though, his first two books are really enough to fill that market IMO.

I listened to an audio version of this book narrated by Will Wheaton. The narration was excellent and kept me listening even when I was cringing a several points in the plot. This was a fun story, but you needed to suspend your belief and then suspend it again. Even though one of the recurring themes is how unbelievable the events of the story are; there was a whole higher level of disbelief I needed to engage in. It was a little difficult to figure out who the target reader was intended to be. I grew up in the 1970s, so I got most of the music/video/gaming references. For much of the middle of the book, I thought the story was definitely written for a current 16 to 18 year old male audience who wouldn't get the numerous cultural references from their parents' childhood. At times the protagonist was whiney and immature enough to make me root for the aliens. There was plenty of well-written action to carry the book through its weak points. The ending completed the plot, but wasn't totally satisfactory to me.

This book seemed to be going out of its way to annoy me most of the time. I really enjoyed Ready Player One, and while this book is superficially similar to the first one, it's not on the same level. The main character is not particularly likeable (which is not necessarily bad if they have other redeeming qualities - this one did not) and the other characters are barely described, the plot makes no sense at all (and, to be fair, the characters kind of acknowledge that to some degree), the "plot twists" are visible from a mile away, and the writing is, shall we say, not great. Clichés abound. And exposition. And repeated details (how many times do we need to be told that the main character's music playlist comes from his father's tape and is called "Raid the Arcade"? many, many times, that's how many).

My recommendation is that you go watch The Last Starfighter instead. It's the same story and you'll enjoy it more.

TL:DR If you liked Ready Player One this might (or not) be for you. Don't get stuck thinking this is a clone of another well-known sf story. The end might be worth the rest. So don't give up just yet ...

I immensely enjoyed [b: Ready Player One|9969571|Ready Player One|Ernest Cline|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1406383612s/9969571.jpg|14863741] precisely for its pop-culture references and gamer content. You get all that again. Maybe even a little too much of it. Despite cool passages, (paraphrased:) "You're a lying bag of shit just like Obi-Wan." / "And you're a whiny bitch just like Luke." Armada managed to leave me cold.

The story takes place in our time, starting with the 18 year old first person narrator Zack Lightman going to school in his hometown Beaverton in Oregon. By day he's a bored student, by night he turns into an elite fighter pilot in the MMO Armada. His (dead) father was a gamer before him, and Zack hero-worships the man he never met. But he's also worried that he might have inherited a few other less cool traits like a penchant for paranoia and hallucinations from him.

Subjectively I'd rate this 2 stars. I had so little fun with this book. But I do realize that I am at fault a little too. Sometimes I read the first 40 pages of a book and something ticks me off, that book turns into a lost cause. The smart thing would be to stop reading but despite recognizing the point at which this happens clearly, usually I want to finish the book just so I can say: "I did it and here's why it is so terrible." So here I am enraged at wasting my time for about 80 percent of the book, and even worse: I kind of liked the end (well most of it).

And I cannot even put my finger on it. The pop-culture references at the beginning are overwhelming and I think that started my whole downward spiral into disliking the book.

Also the first big reveal is very much not a reveal, because it is advertised from about page one and then it takes 100 more pages to get there.

These two facts taken together made for a bad start into the book. It get's better and more unique after that.


For two thirds of the book I felt I was reading a cheap clone of [b: Ender's Game|375802|Ender's Game (The Ender Quintet, #1)|Orson Scott Card|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1408303130s/375802.jpg|2422333]. I kept waiting for the twist, and waited, and waited and all the waiting distracted me terribly from the writing - which is not bad at all - and what was going on in the plot. There are similarities to Ender but the disappointment and distraction I felt at reading a rip-off were purely my own.