Welcome back, everyone! It's good to return to writing about things I love...and hate. Today's review is going to be of the latter variety, unfortunately. I absolutely adore Ready Player One. It's a terrific book with great characters, a fun story, and lots of references to things I've heard of before. Since I listened to it as an audio book I was also treated to Wil Wheaton's terrific performance. So let's get to it. As always, **SPOILERS** abound ahead. You have been warned!
Rating: 2/10
Expected Rating 9/10
The Good:
Once again Mr. Cline creates (or seems to create) a memorable cast of characters. From the pair of Mikes that serve as our protagonist's best friends at the beginning, to the charming programmer/mech pilot Lex, to the varied group of pilots that Zack meets on his way to the moon. In fact, the only truly terrible character is Zack himself.
The concept is interesting to any video game nerds out there, it starts out as a variation on The Last Starfighter's plot: someone uses video games to train pilots to fight in a war for survival. The execution lacked quite a bit, but it was nice to have that concept updated a bit.
Once again, I enjoyed the audio book, and once again Wil Wheaton did a terrific job emoting and narrating as necessary. This book would honestly have gotten 1/10 from me if it was not for Mr. Wheaton's quality performance.
The Bad:
Zack Lightman is not an interesting character. Early in the novel it's mentioned that he has a severe temper problem and once blacked out and beat a guy into unconsciousness, as a teenager. We never see his temper flare up to anything near that degree again. He gets angry a lot, and a lot of times when it seems either excessive or entirely unnecessary; but the dangerous terrifying rage that was hinted at never even peeks out at us. He's just your average moody teen, and not even close to in an interesting way/
The pacing is way too fast, and the other characters barely get to contribute. Whenever a fight occurs, Zack quickly destroys a dozen or so ships and if Lex is present, she'll take out a couple mechs, maybe the other pilots get a couple kills. And then a lot of nothing happens. There's rarely any true tension, and most of Zack's allies die as useless cannon fodder to give him time to escape whatever dilemma he's in so he can go to the next problem.
Speaking of characters doing things seemingly only motivated by moving Zack on to the next plot point instead of being driven by their own priorities, let's talk about Admiral Vance and the defense of the Earth Defense Alliance headquarters near the beginning of the book. As you'll recall, after defeating all but one of the enemy Glaive fighters, the lone survivor took off toward the launch silos for the good guy ships. Zack was ordered to let it go so the automated defenses could handle it, but he ignored the command because he was so sure he knew more than everyone else. Including Admiral Vance, aka Viper, aka the second best pilot according to the Armada rankings. Because his disobeys repeated orders to break off pursuit, the alien vessel does not encounter the defenses and is able to self-destruct in the landing bay.
(Let's pause here for a second and note two terrible inconsistencies: the defenses didn't activate because they might have damaged/destroyed the good guy ship in close pursuit of the alien. However, since the good guys fly their ships remotely such a safety feature seems like extremely poor planning considering the cost of one fighter vs an entire hangar bay full of them. Beyond that, once the alien exploded, which was entirely Zack's fault, it completely destroyed a hangar and caused cave-ins throughout the base. And somehow didn't kill anyone. The odds that no techs were in the hangar bay working on any of the fighters and that the cave-ins only occurred in somehow empty areas of the base seem exceptionally remote, to me)
Admiral Vance dresses down Zack, but then not only does not kick him out of the EDA, he also does not even demote him (skill gets you rank in the EDA, so Zack became a high ranking officer just for signing up, which completely defies the entire purpose of a military hierarchy). He then proceeds to give him the most prestigious assignment possible, merely because Zack's dad is another high-ranking officer and requested it. When a person drastically damages your entire already-doomed war effort, don't you have to do SOMETHING? Even a slap on the wrist. But nothing happens, he just gets sent on his way so he can continue being awesome.
The Ugly:
Ready Player One was noted for its heavy use of 80's pop culture nostalgia. The references in that book, however, were part of puzzles to be solved and frequently contributed directly to the plot. In Armada there are EVEN MORE REFERENCES. And they mostly contribute nothing other than to make sure you know that Mr. Cline still remembers every single thing that happened in the 80's. This comes to a complete disaster of a head when the game Armada is described for the reader/listener. It's pages/minutes of references to directors, actors, composers, and writers. If they've done something in the last 20-30 years to make nerds happy, they're name-dropped. Music? John Williams. Special Effects? Peter Jackson. pre-game scene narration? Morgan Freeman. On and on and on. It completely defies reason and belief to the point that even my willing and hopeful Suspension of Disbelief was subverted. It reminded me that this was just a book, and would never be real. And that should never be the goal of a story. You may have heard the term "Mary Sue". This term refers to any character who is too perfect to be real, usually found in fan-fiction. In the book Armada, the game Armada is the closest thing to a Mary Sue inanimate object that I have ever seen.
That problem isn't contained to just the description of the game, either. Zack goes on and on at length when he discovers that Carl Sagan narrates the introductory video for new EDA recruits. He refers to his mother as an Ellen Ripley type, without giving any context for how that might be true. It's all throughout the book, and it's not fun it's just entirely overwhelming.
The big reveal. If you haven't read the book, and you still think you might want to, do not read ANY FURTHER. YOU SHALL NOT PASS! (See, I can do it, too!)
About halfway through the book Zack meets his dad who eventually explains that all may not be as it seems with the alien conflict. The aliens have been sending messages to earth, and those messages are clips of movies and tv shows that show humans not co-existing with aliens. He also points out the very video-gamey way the aliens fight. They always fly in the same patterns, to the point that shooting your guns to the rhythm of certain songs scores kills every time. They also sent their ships in ever-difficulty-increasing waves for the past 50 years. Beyond that, they always build their fleets in full view of earth telescopes so that the humans can see what's coming and when. When they created a new 'boss type' enemy ship that's nearly impossible to destroy, they gave it a single weakness where if a human appears to sacrifice their life the otherwise impenetrable shields will stay down long enough for the ship to be destroyed. The aliens also allowed their technology to fall into human hands early on so that humans would have a fighting chance in the upcoming war. So...this is a test of some sort, right? Gotta be! Well...what are they testing. Well since they remind us of video games, what is the point of video games of these genres? To survive, to excel, to defeat the enemy faster and better every time. So surely that must the plan. Humans just have to keep winning the game until the aliens give up and say they're good enough? Right? NO! Of course not, silly logic using human. The aliens made it look like a video game so the humans would know it wasn't real! That way the humans would know that they should be seeking out peace instead of war. Does it make sense now? No? Too bad. Our protagonist and his father figured it out all the same.
They determine that the only way to survive the final wave that's coming at them is to convince the aliens not to use it. And the way they plan to do this is to stop Admiral Vance from deploying the planet buster weapon on Jupiter's moon, Europa, the perceived home world of their enemies. Let's just list off the final set of inconsistencies present here:
1.) Xavier Lightman's distraction. He attacks the new EDA headquarters to distract Vance and his cronies to give Zack a fighting chance to stop them. He does this by taking some mechs into the flight control area and setting them to self-destruct, Vance and co. can't stop him so they evacuate. At this point Zack's dad SHOULD have stopped the self destruct for 2 reasons: Because it would have forced Vance to wonder why, and because the character had already been thought to be dead only to miraculously come back twice. Had he aborted the self-destruct, Vance would have been forced to investigate what Xavier was doing in his control room, which would have given Zack even more time to deal with the fighters out in space. He could have turned it on and off several times until it was too late for Vance to do anything to stop Zack. As for the other, I guess third time is the charm but it seems pretty tacky to me to kill a character 3 times in the same book.
2.) The aliens accept Zack destroying the planet buster as evidence that humans are no longer a threat to other intelligent space-faring species. Sorry mister alien, but a handful of people working against their entire race for the cause of peace shows the POTENTIAL for peaceful interaction, but definitely does not prove they're all ready for it RIGHT NOW.
3.) The alien insists that this has been a test from the beginning, going so far as to say they created a 'standard first contact scenario'. Let's review that first contact scenario, shall we? The aliens dyed or carved or otherwise modified the ice on Europa to create a giant swastika, since their intelligence gathering indicated that there was no symbol more likely to cause distress among the humans. So aliens not only having any of the same arbitrary symbols as each other, those symbols meaning something horrible to the discovering species, and the discovered species creating giant replicas of those symbols in the most attention-getting way possible happens often, does it?
4.) Once the aliens decide humanity gets to live after all, the warships that were all heading to earth turn out to have a dual purpose as technology upgraders. They provide new sources of power, medicine, and more to allow humanity to advance in basically every single way. So how come humanity didn't find that tech in the wreckage of previous attacking forces? The aliens couldn't have known THIS time that the humans would give in to peace. The only logical conclusion is that all of their warships have been outfitted for this dual purpose just in case the humans chose peace at any point before this. But it shouldn't have been possible to 100% conceal all this stuff, especially when the humans must have been desperately combing over every inch of every piece of scrap from every engagement hoping to find something to help them survive the next fight.
Those aren't even all the inconsistencies, just the most egregious ones.
All in all, I think I might have enjoyed this book, even with its flaws, had it not been for that nonsense ending.
So tell me, have you read the book yet? Did you enjoy it? Why or why not. Talk to me in the comments below.
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