Armada

After reading the amazing nerdgasim that is Ready Player One, I went into this book thinking I'd be reading nearly the same amazing story...just set in space...and with aliens. That didn't happen.

I'm not huge on space/aliens in general...same with “war” stuff as well. But I figured I could give this a shot given Ready Player One was so god damn mind blowing.

How Cline went from RPO to this...mess, I will never know.

It has ok parts...I like the geek/nerd references, Lex was pretty cool, and I liked Milo and Shin (yay for gay characters).

But it has a lot of bad parts. The main character and nearly every character (ignoring the ones I liked) were boring. The plot was...convoluted. All the EDA terms were just...god a mess. Maybe it's because I'm not into mechs and war games...but I was skipping over whole chunks of the book just to get through all the junk about EDA mechs and drones and blah blah blah. BORING.

And the self sacrifice bit was pretty obvious as soon as they introduced the dad.

I thought the “romance” between Zack and Lex was...shallow and shoved into the story. I get that “omg the world is ending...let's find a corner and $%*^” mindset...but it just wasn't needed. Lex could have stayed a friend to Zack...and just been a cool kickass strong female character. I think she was cheapened by the need to force them together for a romantic angle.