Halo prequels

A year and change ago some lads on 4chan[nel] were talking Halo books. I wasn't up for a book stuffed with spoilers but some prequels made the list, most notably Nylund's Fall of Reach. There's also Evolutions. It's been ten months but at last, maybe a fortnight ago, I found several such books, used. I got Contact Harvest and The Cole Protocol.

These two were reviewed by Rev. Garrick Sinclair Beckett at the Lutheran Column, here and here respectively. Beckett, I posit, reviewed them in the order in which they should be read. Contact Harvest is the prequel inasmuch as it details first-contact at the planet Harvest (hence the name). But - and here you'll find me disagreeing with a Lutheran, however characteristic of this blog - it's not as good. And thematically I got more out of The Cole Protocol.

CH's problem is that its narrative frames a lore-dump ("so THAT's how it happened!"). Its author Joseph Staten was actually a major writer for the first two games, but hadn't written a novel yet. It's not that "it shows"; Staten proves himself a competent novelist, and I'd happily buy a later book of his. It's just that to give life to a lore-dump / backstory-script, requires a great novelist, if it can be done at all.

TCP by contrast deals with one of the outlier worlds - now a system, on account the Covenant has just got through turning its human-inhabited world into a lavaball. Tobias "Dirt" Buckell here wasn't putting lore into text; he was mopping up the first game's plotholes, sort of doing a fanfic. The main plothole here: how do Covenant races react to the most unCovenantal decision in Covenant history, here that humans aren't to be converted like (say) Kig-Yar and Unggoy, but to be exterminated. Buckell proposes that the implementation of this eternal-doctrine went in stages, that at least the Kig-Yar might make side-deals.

Both books were worth my time. TCP is a 4/5 over CH's 3/5.