Armada by Ernest Cline
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I found this one really tough to get through. I enjoyed Ready Player One, and that’s why I grabbed this book the second I saw it available.
But even as early at page 16 I noted that I was feeling like the author was just stalling, the writing and action stagnated: “First I needed a moment to prepare myself.” I prepared myself by sighing a little bit and hitching up my nerd pants, which I’d put on specially for the reading of this book.
Shortly thereafter we get a list, which I felt was Ernest Cline just loosening his belt buckle as if after a big Thanksgiving meal, saying, “Ah, *now* I feel more comfortable,” as if just a straight up, three plus page list of video game nerd porn was exactly what he’d been dying to work into a book all along.
By page 38 we were watching other people play video games, only the literary version of it. I know… I *understand* that people watch other people’s video game escapades online and even, in some cases, in vast auditoriums around the world. I had the sinking feeling that I’d wandered into the wrong room, say the back room in a dirty old arcade where the lighting isn’t so great, there’s a peculiar smell, and maybe I didn’t want to be in there, after all. The vicarious thrill of watching someone play something with no real consequences isn’t particularly thrilling. I didn’t like the gaggle of guys fondling and espousing different controller types (in the page 44 corner of the room), they just seemed kind of… unwell.
The writing just seemed more stilted than Ready Player One, as well. Instead of figuring out a better way to give us the backstory of the company who created these video games (or maybe leaving it out altogether?), we’re told in this way:
“I clicked through to [Chaos Terrain, the games’ developer]’s website’s “About Us” page and scanned it. As a longtime CT super fan, I already knew quite a lot about the company’s history…” and then we get the contents of the web page, as dictated by the super fan of Chaos Terrain.
But that’s the book. It felt to me like I was doing the reading equivalent of watching someone play a video game, only with a lot more lists of older video game and sci-fi movies and their characters. There are a lot of tangents that you might think make a reappearance later in the book, something worthwhile having remembered, but I guess they’re intended as quick-ish one-liners, jokes that fall flat about as often as they work.
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