Armada

Can roughly 400,000 people be hypnotized into thinking something is good, or at least worth reading? Can all of those people collectively be tricked into seeing something when nothing is there? Friends, after finishing Armada, I think the answer is yes.

Armada is the story of a nerdy high schooler (read: annoying kid who thinks he was born in the wrong generation) whose video gaming skills come in very handy when it turns out aliens are invading and the government has been using not only the specific video game our hero loves (and is best at), but also all of pop-culture, to prepare humanity for the war to come.

Full of references instead of description, characters that have no life, and a story that sort of ends with no purpose, this book is a slog to get through. The author spends pages and pages on references to things he likes like Star Wars or older video games, but leaves the actual characters and stories without much more than a sentence. So of course it is mostly highly rated on goodreads (overwhelmingly so).

I don’t really understand how so many people loved this book, but it seems like a lot of people just saw the words ‘star wars’ and were immediately mesmerized by them. Which makes sense, to an extent. Those movies, as well as the various names the author drops like Carl Sagan, Shigeru Miyamoto, or Stephen Hawking, all have a lot of good will with various audiences. They, in some form or another, have put in work to be trusted, read, played, or enjoyed. So to see them be brought back from the dead, zombified, and have their corpses be used to trick readers into thinking this book is something good comes off as lazy and disingenuous to me, like the author doesn’t believe in his own characters or story.

So I’ll just say this: Do you like anything that has been popular (especially with white men) in the past 50 years like Back to the Future, Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Doom, or Portal 2? Just watch, play, or read that. Don’t let this book bring their corpses back to life in a completely soulless way. Do not read.

Put it another way: one of my favorite musicians is Girl Talk, who for lack of a better term is a mashup artist. He has made roughly hour and a half albums composed totally of other peoples music mixed together. The difference is that is good, and fun to listen to, and this is bad and hurts to read.