Martin refers to The Armageddon Rag as the book that almost ended his career, and after reading it, I can sort of see why. The Armageddon Rag is a complicated book, equal parts ode to and condemnation of the sixties and the Baby Boomers, with a healthy dose of fantasy and horror thrown in. It's a tough book to pin down, both genre-wise and attitude-wise, and I think a lot of people would find something like this confusing. Also, if you are a Baby Boomer, this book will probably make you mad (Martin isn't gentle about what he sees as the failings of the generation), and if you're not, you'll probably just be confused by the references and the nostalgia. On the other hand, some of it may be familiar to those who witnessed or participated in Occupy Wall Street; while the Occupy movement never got quite as big and forward-movey as the 1960s Anti-War Hippie movement did, the root of it was the same sort of discontent and desire for change that Martin discusses in this book. 
 Moving past the message a bit, I had several issues with the book. The first was the two-dimensionality of the characters. I get that they were supposed to be archetypes and maybe even allegorical figures, but a good bit of the strength of Martin's writing usually comes from his deep and nuanced characters. Even his main character was flat and generally uninteresting. Which brings me very quickly to my next problem--Ananda. She's probably the most interesting, most nuanced character in the book, and she starts a relationship with Sandy almost immediately, with no prelude or reasoning. Granted, we find out later that sex is her way of controlling him, but that's a couple of hundred pages of wondering why this woman would be remotely interested in the boring, flat Sandy. 
 Closely related to that is Martin's handling of race. He doesn't exactly have the best track record with writing people of color; even as late as A Dance with Dragons, there are some serious problems with representation and how he writes non-white people. Ananda represents another of those problems; she is lusty, ruthless, and manipulative--and the only person of color I noticed in the book. Certainly the only one who is a main character. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call Martin a racist, but his handling of non-white characters can be distinctly troubling. 
 This might be the worst of Martin's (post-fanzine) work that I've read; I may have dnf-ed Dying of the Light, but that wasn't because it was bad, just that it wasn't for me (hard sci-fi is not my genre). I think he got too passionate and preachy about the subject material, and that caused the entire book to fall really flat.