Galliam said:
It's a bad idea. And I totally HATE the conversation wheel. Master chief never says anything like what I choose for him to say.
Now I believe you owe me a halo.
Nicely played, sir.
ZeroMachine said:
All I'll tell you is this: STICK WITH CRYPTUM. It isn't written that well and it starts out obnoxiously boring, but once you realize what's going on and everything you know starts appearing, you realize that the strange, abstract style in which it's written is 100% purposeful. It isn't the best book in the series (I'm reading through them all again right now and so far I have to say I think Contact Harvest is) but it is SO FREAKIN' WORTH IT.
I can't believe you said it wasn't the best in the series! Cryptum and Fall of Reach/First Strike are godly. Cryptum is the first non-military Halo book, and the history that it created was absolutely fascinating, as well as the
geas and concepts like that, and the sheer amount of time that passes between events makes everything feel epic. Couple that with the fact that instead of just creating a new history for the Forerunners/Flood etc., Bear actually creates a new history for humanity. Hard science fiction. It's my first experience with it, but I couldn't have imagined a better plot. I can't wait for the second one (I have a review of the first if you guys wanted to read that).
Nylund's books are all about military, but he creates some new fiction and an entire new storyline that still has relevance to the main plot of the games. In contrast to other game sci-fi like, say, Drew Karpyshyn's
Mass Effect novels, in which the plot feels oddly disjointed and only marginally relevant to the main plot, and the dialogue feels like you're staring at the conversation wheel the entire time, and the characters are all one-dimensional, Nylund does a wonderful job of actually giving Halo some fictional backbone to lean on.
Contact Harvest was the worst of all the Halo novels IMO, save the short story
Mona Lisa in
Halo: Evolutions (except the ending, that was pretty good).
Harvest just felt WAY too 'military, hurr durr, epic guns r epic, spaec lazers' for me. The passages where they're fighting the Insurrectionists are okay, but I was hoping for a huge, epic reaction to the discovery of alien life for humanity; but instead, it's just Johnson being all, "I kicked dat mofo right in da FACE, boy! Have a lil' taste of some lead!", and talking about how great agriculture will be in the future. That just inherently can't come close to what Greg Bear produced.
Plus, the dialogue and thought process descriptions of the two AI's doesn't really come close to the descriptions of Cortana in Nylund's books and in
Evolutions' short story
Human Weakness.
Glad you enjoyed it, but I don't think Tobias Buckell should write any more
Halo stuff. I felt the same way about his story
Dirt in
Evolutions; just felt really strange and the plot didn't really seem to hold up very well, and everyone is just too vulgar. (Better than Karpyshyn making everyone super-angelic though.)