Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Game Over


Armada: A Novel – Ernest Cline (Crown Books)

**Full disclosure up front: I did not read Ernest Cline’s much ballyhooed, fan favorite, debut novel Ready Player One and I am not a gamer or sci-fi nerd fan boy.

That being said, I really wanted to like cline’s second outing, Armada: A Novel, but nearly right from the start I was underwhelmed by not only the story line which felt like an amalgam of a thousand little pieces of so many familiar stories, movies and video games, but also the amateurish delivery.

 

I don’t automatically dislike books or movies that give a nod to their predecessors; the homage can be fun when it’s delivered with finesse. But here it comes off with all of the subtlety of a 12 pound sledgehammer.

It was the fun pop culture references that kept me reading in the nearly futile hope that it would get better if I just kept plugging. Unfortunately it was not to be, because it was just one too many shovels full of those references.

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