Comfort re-read this over the weekend when The Dark Tower was kicking my ass. It did its job admirably. Well, actually, I will confess that the bleak atmosphere of Cline’s 2045 wasn’t as comforting as it usually is because all the bleakness and decay felt a lot less imaginary and removed than it has in the past. But the gamified storyline and the sheer pleasure of solving puzzles and having adventures and beating the corrupt bad guy in order to win the day was still really fucking […]
Into the OASIS
I actually first read this book, Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, a couple of years ago. And, at that time, I only gave it four stars. I thought it was good, and sometimes even great, but uneven. Although I was familiar with a lot of the RPG gaming references and 80s movie references, the arcade and video game references were, for the most part, completely over my head. And the references to Japanese cartoon and robots were on a different planet. So, I didn’t […]
More space than fantasy is not as much my thing
I loved Ready Player One, so when I saw another book by Ernest Cline, I grabbed it. Armada is very similar, but not quite as great. It’s got the fun mix of characters, a good geeky premise, and adventure, but it just doesn’t quite have the sparkle that the other story does. I wonder if maybe I didn’t love Armada as much because I was comparing it to its predecessor, and the significant parallels between the books make that really easy to do. Both books […]
“It was the dawn of new era, one where most of the human race now spent all of their free time inside a videogame.”
Our adventure takes place in the near future (about 30 years from now). Most people spend most of their time online (wait…) only online is way cooler. They have the OASIS, which is kind of like a holodeck. You put on a visor and haptic gloves and interact with your online world via your avatar. (Kind of like the movie Avatar.) And as the real world has gone to shit, being in the OASIS is way better than real life. The creator of the OASIS, […]
“They Should’ve Sent a Gamer”
Ernest Cline has a lot going for him: His first major novel (Ready Player One) was a huge success, it is being turned into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, and he is getting a screenwriting credit. Cline’s follow up to Ready Player One is Armada. In the simplest of terms, it’s the story of some nerds who try to save the world. Like Ready Player One, Armada is a story largely told through nerd culture references from the 1970s to the present. However, while […]
I’m on board until someone mentions Zubaz pants.
In a vacuum, I think this book gets four stars. In a vacuum, I think the general opinion for the book is that it’s an engaging story with fairly likable characters that pays homage to numerous classic and iconic science fiction stories from past decades: from Ender’s Game to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a vacuum. But this book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In the rich and dense atmosphere of Earth, this is the much anticipated follow-up to Ready Player One, which […]
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