Installation 07 (Zeta Halo) as seen on the Halo Infinite main menu. Credit to u/MythicPink for removing the text as found on this Reddit Thread

   
         When you picture the “Great Works” of science fiction, you may think of a classic novel like Dune, or your favorite H.G. Wells story, or another equally genre-defining tale. But there’s a secret set of science fiction novels that are on par with these stories. What if I told you the absolute best science fiction novels were hiding in a series of videogame promotional tie-ins?

         Ok I lied a little, they’re not THAT amazing. When you see a shelf full of Halo books at your local bookstore, you may be tempted to simply pass them by as cash-grabs trying to squeeze a bit more out of Xbox’s once great franchise. I could hardly blame you, excellent tie-in novels are often quite rare. And indeed, some of the “Halo” books do fall into a familiar trap: bland, safe, mediocrity. However…..

         For every “meh” reading experience one book offers, there’s at least one other book that will wow you with just how much it accomplishes behind its branded cover. In fact, one of these books, The Fall of Reach, was absolutely instrumental in developing my love of science fiction. Today we’re going to talk about two Halo novels, and how they exceed their admittedly low expectations to deliver fantastic stories.

                   SPOILERS FOR HALO: THE FALL OF REACH AND HALO: BAD BLOOD BELOW

Installation 00 (The Ark) is a planet-sized facility where the Halo rings are made. Image courtesy of desktopbackground.org

         Before I begin, I figure I should give you a brief refresher on the “Halo” Universe during the time of the original series. By the 2520s, Humankind has expanded out among the stars and lives on thousands of worlds. The UNSC (United Nations Space Command) serves as the central government for humanity, though there are numerous rebel cells who oppose their rule. As humanity seems on the brink of civil war, the sudden emergence of the Covenant, an alien empire made up of numerous different species tied together through their belief in a godlike race called the Forerunners, throws the galaxy into chaos.

         Believing that the Forerunners have ordered humanity’s destruction, the Covenant wage a brutal war with one goal: the extinction of mankind. The culmination of the war leads to the discovery of the Halo rings, ancient superweapons of vast power, and their creation facility, the Ark.

A Note on the Forerunner Trilogy:
         The Forerunner Trilogy is a collection of novels set hundreds of thousands of years before the Halo games that details the creation of many races and factions in the Halo universe. Chiefly it documents the Forerunners (duh), Ancient Humans, the Percussors (the godlike creators of many species in “Halo”), the Flood, and the creation of the franchises’ namesake, the Halo Rings.

         It is a wonderful prequel trilogy written by an equally wonderful author, the late Greg Bear.
Each one of the three books deserves a spot here, and because of that I made the difficult decision to leave them off of this list so that I might cover them in their own articles at a future date.

Note: The excerpts provided here come from my personal copy of Halo: The Fall of Reach: The Definitive Edition, written by Eric Nylund and Published by Tor in 2010.

         The Fall of Reach has the unique distinction of being the first Halo novel ever released, actually coming out before the first game on October 1st of 2001. The Fall of Reach is a true prequel novel, covering the start of the Human-Covenant War, the origins of Master Chief, Cortana and some of the other side characters, and of course the invasion of Reach. Something to keep in mind is that the novel The Fall of Reach came out around 9 years before the video game Halo: Reach came out. While the two tales of Reach’s glassing are not 100% incompatible, they do have numerous continuity errors when viewed as taking place in the same universe. Want a hot take? I actually prefer the book’s events over the game.

         The book opens on a prologue of the Spartans, who are shown to be enormously capable super soldiers, neutralizing the Covenant on the planet of Jericho VII under the leadership of John-117, the Master Chief. This is one of the first cannon depictions of Halo’s iconic Spartans and it does them a great service.

         However, despite the Spartan’s success, the UNSC Navy has been defeated in orbit around the planet and the Spartans are ordered to evacuate. The following scene is set on the bridge of the UNSC Destroyer Resolute and, in my opinion, is a microcosm of this book’s ultimate success: atmosphere and mood.

         This is such a fantastic exercise in not only world-building (seriously, this prologue sets up two major factions, the main and side characters, motivations, in-universe rules and customs, etc.) but also in clearly defining the stakes: humanity is not fighting to win, it is fighting to survive. The Covenant, this alliance of diverse alien races that bark at us in a language we don’t understand and cut us down with weapons we could only dream of making ourselves, is so ruthless that their finishing moves in a fight are to burn the surface of a planet to glass, eradicating everything there.

         The Fall of Reach, while being a sci-fi story, is really a tale about survival. Anything and everything mankind has at its disposal is thrown up against the Covenant in a desperate attempt to stop them. I would love to summarize each chapter like this, and perhaps I will in a future article, but let’s keep moving for now.

         After the prologue, the book jumps back in time before the first encounter with the Covenant, detailing Jacob Keyes (later the famous Captain Keyes in the games) and Doctor Catherine Halsey scoping out candidates for a top-secret ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence, or essentially Halo’s  equivalent to the CIA) program. The candidate they are viewing is a boy named John, the future Master Chief. After a brief encounter where John reveals his greatest talent, Luck, chapter 2 ends on Halsey lamenting everything she was condemning this boy to suffer through by accepting him into the program.

         The story keeps rolling from there, establishing the kidnapping and back-breakingly intense training of the child candidates of ONI’s Spartan Program and showing us the the program’s purpose: to create super soldiers to crush rebellion against the galactic government of the UNSC. John’s skills as a leader and the lessons he learns about commanding a team continue to grow until the Spartans are sent on their first field mission to neutralize rebellious human forces.

         Shortly after, the Covenant are introduced proper with haunting descriptions of the first planet to be glassed: the farm world of Harvest. After first contact was made, something casued the aliens to become aggitated and glass the planet. Their motivation of religious war against humanity is established here too, claiming that mankind’s destruction is the will of the gods. Recognizing the severity of this threat, ONI reassigns the Spartans to fight in the new war against the Covenant: The Human-Covenant War.

         From then on, we get many great chapters detailing the Covenant’s unstoppable rampage across human space, humanity’s (and the Spartan’s) attempts to stop the Covenant from finding their colonies, and plenty of what I consider the best part of this book: the space battles. Eric Nylund is fantastic at writing space naval combat. The actions flow wonderfully, the language is descript but doesn’t drag, and the setups and payoffs are well executed.

         The Covenant ships are established early on as having two major advantages over UNSC ships. First, they have energy shields. These shields deflect, absorb, or otherwise negate all but the most powerful UNSC arms and weapons. Second, their plasma weaponry is so powerful that it often destroys UNSC ships with a single strike. This is why, much to the Spartan’s dismay, the UNSC Navy is constantly losing to the Covenant. The only hope UNSC ships have to cause enough damage to make the Covenant ships’ shields overload, allowing them to attack the ship directly. There is a nice contrast between the Covenant’s brutally precise plasma weapons and the UNSC’s MAC cannons, which use a magnetic round thrown at insanely high speeds to smash opposing ships to pieces.

         There are two naval combat scenes I would like to highlight. The first scene is set near the planet of Sigma Octanus IV. Jacob Keyes, now Captain Keyes, encounters a surprise Covenant fleet made up of two frigates, a carrier, and a destroyer. By now, it has been well established that even one Covenant frigate would be enough to make swiss-cheese of Keyes’ UNSC Destroyer, the “Iroquois”. Keyes is forced to make a series of daring decisions opening with the “Keyes Loop”, where he uses the Covenant’s plasma torpedoes, which were tracking his ship, to destroy the Covenant Destroyer by flying straight at it and changing course at the last second. The torpedoes have no time to redirect and melt the destroyer. Following this, he slingshots around the planet and uses a series of well-timed maneuvers to destroy the two frigates. It’s a great scene that is well-worth a read.

         The second scene is the following battle for Sigma Octanus IV. By this time in the war, the UNSC Navy is desperate for a win to boost morale and calls in a large number of capital ships to defend the somewhat irrelevant planet. I won’t spoil much of this scene, as I once again ask you to “Read it! It’s so good!!!”, but it is a large-scale fight for the planet that barely ends in UNSC victory. While a lesser writer would’ve employed copious amounts of plot armor to achieve that victory, the consistent use of clever mechanics and tactics by Eric Nylund leaves you rooting for the underdog UNSC and satisfied when they manage to pull through.

One more scene I would like to highlight is the first meeting between Master Chief and the AI Cortana. Cortana is portrayed very well in this book, and her not-quite-mother yet not-quite-lover affection for John is done better than normal. They are first paired up to complete a very difficult training exercise, which includes enemy soldiers, machine guns, mines, and even a jet firing missiles. As they progress through it, the pair realize they are meant to fail this test and die.

However, using a series of clever strategies (sound familiar?), they make it out alive. This culminates with John literally punching a missile out of their way. It sounds silly, but it flows perfectly within the text. Despite the gravitas of the ending, my favorite part of this scene comes early on. Cortana is inserted into John’s MJOLNIR Armor via a data chip and the two are told to wait inside a tent until the test begins. John is ordered to count to ten, the test will start when he’s done. Very quickly, Master Chief and Cortana begin to realize that the test will be much harder than was let on:

          Something about how flatly John explains his plan makes me laugh every time.

         It’s not all sunshine and rainbows however. Throughout the book, the planets of the UNSC are slowly picked apart and glassed until only a handful remain. The UNSC enacts the Cole Protocol, which seeks to wipe the navigational data of human ships before they can be captured by the Covenant, in order to protect their remaining worlds. Of these, the two most important are Earth and the book’s namesake: Reach.

         Reach is properly shown throughout the book as humanity’s primary military fortress, and how pivotal it is to the war effort is demonstrated so cleanly that by the time the Covenant arrive, you already understand what’s at stake. The Covenant find Reach via a tracking probe on the Iroquois, and their invasion is completely overwhelming in its scale. As the UNSC Navy desperately tries to defend the planet, the Spartans are split into two teams: Blue Team, who includes Master Chief, is sent to Reach’s orbit in order to clear out a ship that failed to enact the Cole Protocol, and Red Team, who are sent to Reach’s surface in order to defend the power systems for the planet’s orbital defense gird.

         Before this point in the book, a few Spartans have been picked off by the Covenant. In comparison, Reach is an absolute bloodbath. Nearly every Spartan except John is dead, comatose, or presumed dead by the end of the fight. The defense’s power systems are taken offline by a massive ground invasion, and while John succeeds in enacting the Cole Protocol, it is hardly a victory next to what was lost. It’s a truly bloody fight that earns its right as the novel’s namesake. Reach is glassed, and John, Cortana, and Keyes flee on a random slipspace (Halo’s method of faster-than-light travel”) jump with the Covenant are hot on their tails. However, this jump was not random: using coordinates recovered from an artifact earlier in the book, Cortana steers the jump towards wherever they encode for. These coordinates, of course, lead them to the first Halo Ring to be discovered: Installation 04. Cue the start of Halo: Combat Evolved!

         It’s kind of amazing how much of what this book introduces remains intact in Halo’s canon today. The Covenant’s worship of the Forerunners as gods, the history of the original Spartans and their training, and the desperation of the Human-Covenant war are all essentially the same over 20 years later. It’s a very well put together war story with subtle yet interesting characters and refreshing world-building all tied together under a powerful theme: humanity’s survival against overwhelming odds, and the interpersonal connections that make that survival worth the price.

         And I didn’t even get to talk about the Pillar of Autumn, Operation Red Flag, the Spartan’s stealth infiltration of a museum on Sigma Octanus IV (where the coordinates to the first Halo ring are found), John’s friends turned super soldiers, or Ensign Lovell!

         Look, I’m going to level with you here: I LOVE Bad Blood, even more than The Fall of Reach in some ways, but I’m already well over 2,000 words into this article and talking about another novel could easily double that. 

         Because of that, I have made the decision to separate out Halo: Bad Blood into a part two of this series, which will discuss not only that novel but also the problem all novels set after Halo 5: Guardians faced in their stories. Part 2 will be up next Thursday, April 10th, on B and E Books. I’ll see you there!