For a long while now, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Armada, a book by Ernest Cline whose breakout novel, Ready Player One, remains one of my favorite sci-fi tales. His first book was a timely, fantastic peek into what a VR-consumed society could look like, and though the text was littered with nostalgic references, they made a certain amount of sense within the larger context of the story. Ready Player One also had a depth to it that explored why we have this need for escapism, and the relief gaming can provide. It ends with a pretty complex take on whether or not gaming and virtual lives are a gift or a curse.
Armada carries over all the nostalgia, doubles it, and then adds nothing else to the equation. It’s a massive disappointment in every way, and I was downright shocked how much I disliked it by the end. It’s one of the worst science fiction books I’ve ever read, though I’m hesitant to even call it that.
Truth is, I don’t know what genre Armada is. It isn’t sci-fi. Not really. The only words I can really use to describe it would be “nostalgia porn,” but not in a goofy, innocuous /r/gaming “Remember Pokemon Red and Blue?” kind of way. Rather, it’s a relentless nostalgia assault. You can’t read more than two adjacent pages without some kind of geek reference being made.
Armada is the story of an 18 year-old boy named Zack whose dead father believed in a conspiracy that the government was making science fiction movies and games as propaganda to prepare for a coming alien invasion. Zack begins to believe that the game he and most of the world are currently obsessed with, a space-fighter sim called “Armada,” is a key part of that master plan.
A weird premise, but passable, I suppose. The problem becomes when the book never stops name-dropping, from the first page, the last. It’s a non-stop flood of references that’s so intense it’s almost a parody of itself. Take the book’s description of how Armada was made, for example. It describes the game as a collaboration between famed game developers like Richard Garriott, Hidetaka Miyazaki, Gabe Newell and Shigeru Miyamoto. If that’s not enough to make you cock your head, how about the fact that James Cameron designed all the ships and mechs, Peter Jackson and Weta did all the cutscenes, and John Williams wrote the score for it? Reading all that is like when I was a kid and I invented my own superhero who could fly like Superman, had claws like Wolverine, was as strong as The Hulk and had a Green Lantern power ring to boot.
It’s absurd. And it only gets more absurd from there.
It’s perfectly okay to have your science fiction novel be inspired by previous books, movies, TV shows or video games. That’s how most great fiction is built, off the influences of others. But Armada takes this a step further and constructs literally everything out of what has come before, referencing it directly all the while. It’s so meta it makes your heard hurt, and by the end if I heard one more character utter a movie quote, I felt like I was going to vomit.
There’s a difference between describing the hangar of a spaceship in a way that might remind readers of Battlestar Galactica, and just plain writing “I stepped into a hangar that looked like it was straight out of Battlestar Galactica.” This happens not just a few times in the book, but it pervades every inch of it. The entire writing style is based on it. Here we have a book that isn’t just content mashing together the beginning of The Last Starfighter and the end of Ender’s Game to form its plot. It literally has to tell you “this is lot like The Last Starfighter” or “it was straight out of Ender’s Game” in the text itself. This is not an “homage.” This is something else, and I’ve never quite seen anything like it.
Characters communicate almost entirely in movie quotes. A mom stomps her foot when her son is in trouble and says “You shall not pass!” A half dozen times before a starfighting mission, someone says “the Force is with you.” For crying out loud, someone spray paints “THE CAKE IS A LIE” on the walls of a moon base. It’s not a book, it’s collection of memes hammered together in a rough shape of a plot.
Weirdly, it gives the book a very juvenile tone, as in, I think this could have been a fine adventure story for the 9-12 year old crowd. But of course 9-12 year olds weren’t even born before 95% of these references existed, and the book is filled with a few dozen f-bombs and awkward references to sex. Regardless, the lead character feels like he’s 12, not 18, for most of the book, and not gearing it toward a younger set seems like a mistake, given the overarching plot and dialogue.
Fundamentally, if you strip away all the references in Armada and just focus on the actual story, you’re just left with a poor man's version of Ender’s Game, whereas Ready Player One had a fundamentally interesting and original concept under its veneer of nostalgia. Armada is a bizarre experience for someone who loves video games, sci-fi and even the author’s previous book. Yet as the prime target audience I was repulsed by an overabundance of pandering and a desire to use nerdy references as replacements for something, anything remotely original.
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