- The Last Starfighter 
 - Ender's Game 
 -"Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar, Galactica, leads a ragtag, fugitive fleet on a lonely quest for a shining planet known as Earth. 
 - Proton packs 
 - Twiki from Buck Rogers 
 - "I'd buy that for a dollar!" 
 - Ms Pac-Man 
 - Mix tapes 
 - "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope." 
 - Pitfall 
 - "Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished." 
 - Tron 
 - "Where we're going, we don't need roads!" 
 - Defender 
 - Warp core breaches 
 - "Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" 
 - Voight-Kampff test 
 - Streets of Fire 
 - "Yippie-ki-yay, motherf......." 
 Why did you stop me? What's that you say? You can't just string a bunch of nerdy '80s pop culture references together and call it a coherent piece of writing? Maybe not, but Ernest Cline is getting rich doing it so I thought I'd give it a try. 
 Ah, but seriously folks... 
 Zach Lightman is a high school kid whose only real talent is playing video games. His father was killed in an accident right after he was born, and thanks to an attic full of the old man's stuff Zach is well versed in '80s movies, TV, and music. There's also a notebook in which his dad theorized that all the pop culture since the '70s was done as part of a plan to prepare the world for a coming alien invasion, and video games were introduced to train the public on how they'd fight them. Zach learns that his father's theory was right when he gets scooped up by the Earth Defense Alliance because his skills are needed to help fight off the space invaders. 
 Cline has lifted elements from stories like The Last Starfighter and Ender's Game, and then used the notion that the EDA has been influencing Earth's culture for decades to create a loop in which he can continually roll out nerdy references to the point where you'll want to punch the next person who says anything about Star Wars within your hearing. Oh, and Futurama also did this plot in a much better and funnier way about 7 years earlier. 
 Borrowing story from other works isn't the worst thing about this though. The part Cline lifted is used fairly often in entertainment as general wish fulfillment that any kid might be exceptional somehow. So this doesn't come across as quite the act of plagiarism it sounds like from the premise of the book. That's far from the biggest problem with Armada. 
 The important thing here is that Ernest Cline is a goddamn hack. 
 I thought his first book Ready Player One was lightweight mildly entertaining sci-fi that mainly coasted by due to its appeal as Gen-X nostalgia porn, but Cline is like that guy at work who made one decent joke that got a short giggle out of you once in the break room and after that repeats a variation of it every time you bump into him in the hall. With this second book he's shown that he has no other moves than playing the pop culture card because Armada is nothing but the same gag repeated ad nauseam. 
 My irritation starts with Zach Lightman because just as in RP1 we once again have a teenage hero who is obsessed with the '80s despite not living in them. Yeah, Cline makes up some reasons as to why a kid in the future or in the present would get into this, but in reality this is just an excuse for a middle-aged man to put his own youth culture into the mouths of younger characters in an attempt to convince us all that the '80s were totally awesome and completely relevant today, dude! 
 It also gives him the opportunity to unleash his never ending stream of nerdy references in lieu of actually writing a book. The main character can't describe anything, anyone, or any emotional state without using pop culture as shorthand. Almost everything that happens to him has to be expressed by comparing it to a movie, TV show, or video game. He literally can't describe his own mother without evoking Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley to give you an idea of her toughness even though she's a nurse, not a robot fighting survivalist or alien exterminator.(view spoiler)[ Yes, I know she does fight aliens at the end, but even if you want to believe that's foreshadowing, it's once again using famous sci-fi characters to tell us what to expect out of Cline's creation rather than trying to do it himself. If he had bothered to build up the mom as tough so that we bought into the idea that she's shooting lasers at aliens and then compare her to Sarah Connor in a joke or comment, then that might actually pay off in the moment if done well. But then he would have had to come up with a way to describe her early on without using the crutch of references, and that just wasn't gonna happen. (hide spoiler)] 
 Some might try to say that this is Cline deliberately writing a hero with extremely nerdy obsessions to explore the nature of geek fandom, but that excuse doesn't fly because almost every single character in this book does the same thing. Even the hard-core military guy in charge of the EDA makes a Top Gun reference when talking to Zach. After all, this is a book written by a guy who drives a goddamn DeLorean so I'm not buying the theory that Cline is just commenting on people who are rabid fans of the '80s when he's also foaming at the mouth. 
 It's in just about every conversation, and that highlights another problem with Cline's dependence on nostalgia. He is so enamored with nerd culture that he thinks that name checking some of its most famous elements is entertaining in and of itself, and he acts like every half-assed joke or quote he tosses out is inherently great just because we'll recognize where it came from. 
 It's weirdly out of touch that he writes this like acknowledging a reference puts someone in an exclusive club that only a few like minded souls belong to. When Zach meets the obligatory geek dream girl he falls for after joining the EDA she's drinking from a flask painted like R2-D2, and that's supposed to be a sign that they have things in common. As if finding a Star Wars fan in a crowd of some of the best gamers on Earth would be hard to do. 
 I'd also like to point out to Cline that there is a new Star Wars movie coming out in December, and its trailers on You Tube already have several million views. The third Star Trek after the franchise reboot is in production. Hell, even Adam Sandler made an '80s video game movie although it sounds like he couldn't be bothered to put even this low of an amount of effort into it. So this idea that trotting out "May the Force be with you." is going to be some kind of secret handshake to identify your fellow nerdlingers is pretty much shot to hell in the year 2015. 
 That's part of the problem with Cline thinking that it's just enough to reference this stuff. Imagine if we show up to that Star Wars flick, and Harrison Ford is in just one scene and says, "Hi, I'm Han Solo. Remember that time I got frozen in carbonite? Boy, did that suck. See ya later." There would be riots in the streets if JJ Abrams allowed that to happen because it's not enough to just mention Han Solo, it only works if Han Solo does something cool as part of the plot.* 
 *(Or at least that's the way I feel, but for some reason it seems like there are a helluva lot of fans of all kinds out there who will pee themselves at the slightest hint of something they care about. "SQUEEEE!! It makes me SOOOOOO HAPPY just to see a reference to it! Because I love it SOOOOO MUCH! I don't care if he/she/it just sat in a corner sending text messages for the entire scene instead of doing any of the of things that I originally liked about them to begin with. It was just SOOOOOOO AWESOME to see him/her/it again!!!!" 
 I don't get that, but it's not my problem. I'm here to tell you what's wrong with Cline, not the world.) 
 Essentially Cline is just trying to use things we liked from other works to evoke the same emotions we got from them without bothering to create his own, and he's shoving as many things in there as possible to give readers a sweet nostalgic glow to paper over that shortcoming. 
 For example, he references Iron Eagle which is a '80s movie about a teenager stealing an Air Force jet and blowing up the Middle East to save his dad. It's not enough for Cline to cite that or have Zach's online alias be Iron Beagle. During one scene he has Zach zapping aliens as he listens to Queen's One Vision from his dad's old mix tape, but that's actually done in the movie. Rather than try to build his own moment (Or maybe having a kid from 2015 listen to some music from this century.) Cline points at the film and says, "See, it's just like that! That's what I'm trying to tell you!" 
 On the other hand, he kinda has to do this because he's it's not like he can rely on his writing ability. 
 I've read Stan Lee dialogue in comics from the '60s that was less on the nose and had more sub-text. The characters are all paper thin stereotypes. When Cline has to convey that someone is emotionally upset, and he tries to do more than just remind us of a famous movie scene that demonstrates this he repeatedly describes how their faces contort. For example: "His face contorted in anguish." or "His face contorted in pain." or "His face contorted in a mask of pain." There are multiple variations on that phrase used about every other page for a while in the third act. Maybe if Cline checked a thesaurus instead of IMDB once in a while he could find a new verb. 
 The odd thing is that I'm not even that angry at Cline. He's a shit writer who found a hook that made him insanely popular. It's not the first time it's happened, and it won't be the last. Usually I wouldn't even read it, and I'd let someone else put his books on the same shelf as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. (Damn, but I am just chumming the waters with troll bait on this one, aren't I?) 
 But Ready Player One irked me because its set up was a young guy from the future who was essentially trying to live in my past. Armada outright offends me because Cline takes it even further to the point where the book is nothing but references with the barest bones of any kind of original plot to it. He's unable to craft a real story that might make legitimate use of his '80s obsession so he throws a pot of pop culture spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. It's a mess, and it's making me start to hate many of the things I enjoyed during my adolescence after seeing how annoying it is to be subjected to non-stop unfiltered nerd nostalgia. 
 This is also part of a worrisome trend of shitty movies based on toys and games (Transformers, GI Joe, Battleship) as well as outright reboots (Robocop, Total Recall.), and old TV shows being brought back. (X-Files, Twin Peaks & Full House. That's right, we've hit a point as a culture where we apparently crave the familiar so much that bringing Full House back sounds like a good idea to somebody.) If we keep stuffing the same old stuff back in our mouths again and again, we're eventually going to choke on it. 
 To use a Cline tactic of borrowing something from pop culture for my own purposes I'll modify a quote from True Detective: "My strong suspicion is that we get the sci-fi we deserve." 
 I'm really starting to worry that's true. So let's try to change it. How about if you're craving the concept of this book you go watch that Futurama episode Space Invaders instead? Trust me, it's a lot better.