Armada by Ernest Cline

ArmadaArmada by Ernest Cline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Most of the reviews on Amazon marked as most useful are in the 2 and 3 star range. There’s a reason for that. This book is just okay, but more than that, it is a huge disappointment to fans of Ready Player One, which I gave five stars.

If RPO was a lovefest for vintage video games, Armada is an orgy. It’s really more of a storyboard for a huge pure CGI movie than a novel. Eventually a plot of sorts oozes out, but it barely makes comic book grade. The characters could be right from Archie and Veronica except with F- and S-bombs every other sentence.

The plot can be summarized as: aliens invade earth and the main character, a dweebish first person shooter expert, is inducted into the heretofore secret Earth Defense Alliance to shoot down their spacecraft. Along the way he meets a hot, counterculture girl gamer. Battles ensue accompanied by a bunch of mixed tapes of noxious bands that came after my time. The author makes shameless and rather offensive use of the names of many famous scientists such as Carl Sagan. Still, the author writes reasonably well and the action moves along smartly.

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