I was a fan of the Halo books and the vivid story they painted long before I ever got a hold of the the first game. I was lucky that I was visiting America before the game came out in the UK and I of course wanted to check out an American bookshop where I picked up The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund.
I was hooked in an instant at the amazing story of a futuristic human society that seemed perfect but was yet still paranoid enough to want to develop a super soldier program to stop any civil wars or insurrection that might occur. This of course happened and saw great conflict amongst mankind spread amongst the stars. But then there is nothing quite like a common foe to make people forget their differences and focus on what they share and risk to lose.
The space battles in the book were incredible in their scale and the believability of them and how the physics were described, they made you feel like you were there.
After a time more books came out and I never clicked with many of the later ones until I read Ghosts of Onyx which was again written by Nylund and it created more back story which was then used to create the Fall of Reach game on xbox 360.
The one thing in the Halo games and books that had always remained mysterious and therefore intriguing was the existence of the Forerunners. They are a key factor in the Halo story, the enigmatic people that existed many millienia before humanity had taken to the stars. All you knew of the Forerunners was that they left ruins on many hundreds of worlds, but more importantly that they constructed the Halo arrays and used them to destroy the Flood, a terrible sentient disease that nearly wiped all individual life from the galaxy, but at the same time sacrificing themselves.
All most people had been able to gleam of the Forerunners had been through the terminals found throughout the Halo games that give little pieces of back story mentioning their war against the Flood and mentioned key characters in this war such as the Gravemind, the Librarian and Mendicant Bias.
So in steps Greg Bear.
He was brought in the write a series of books that covers the period of history of the Forerunners and apparently it would unlock some of the mystery of why it is that Humans are called Reclaimer's by 343 Guilty Spark and that we can use Forerunner technology without reverse engineering unlike the member species of the Covenant.
You can imagine my excitement at the prospect of this when I heard the news and I immediately ran out and bought Halo: Cryptum. I was a bit disappointed to be honest. The problem I found with the book was that it was very confusing. Bear had obviously decided that he would write things in such a way so that it would be very different from the rest of the Halo universe so that the great Forerunners would still be on a higher pedestal than humanity. This however meant that it is difficult to follow at times with names of places and characters being so different that I found them tough to remember (not easy when my degrees are focused on people with Greek and Latin names).I was however very interested in the telling of humanities role in Forerunner history, and I must admit part of it brought a swell of pride, even if it is fiction.
That brings me to Halo: Primordium. I was not going to get it to be honest after how confused I was at the end of Cryptum (I still wasn't 100% sure what had happened for most of the book).
However, a very good friend told me that it was in that great place of free knowledge: the local library.
I began Primordium a little sceptical and I am glad that I was wrong. I did find the book somewhat confusing for a time, but it kept giving me little nuggets of a much larger picture that brought both books together in a brilliant way. I read this book in a couple of days because I found it hard to tear myself away and found myself resenting having to head back to work as it was getting in the way.
The story follows a human named Chakas who in the first book had basically been in the wrong (or right) place at the wrong time and was swept up by a Forerunner named Bornstellar and the Didact. Primordium finds him marooned on a Halo installation with a sprawling human population preserved by the Librarian should the Halo arrays be used. Chakas, who has the consciousness of an ancient Human simply known as the Lord of the Admirals, travels trying to find his friend Riser and find a way back home.
He quickly gets caught up in larger affairs such as the Forerunner civil war and encounters the main intelligence of the Flood and also the traitorous Forerunner AI Mendicant Bias. Whilst this is going on you soon get introduced to the view that the story that you are reading is being told to a group of Humans in the contemporary Halo universe by what is quickly revealed to be a Forerunner Monitor (AI). The identity of which is a rather interesting twist not be missed.
The story of the book comes to a nice close that unlike its predecessor was far easier to follow and it leaves the story on a large cliff hanger that I will be very eager to read about in the next instalment whenever that may be. A good instalment that brings merit back to the storyline and ties it into the future Halo stories and possibly Halo 4 the game very well. The only downside of this book is that unless you are a fan and have also read Halo Cryptum, this book will be impossible to get into and all of the main plot twists will most likely be lost on you. If you are a fan, pick up this book and read it now!!!!
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