2011-08-04 10:06![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
digitaldiscipline
digitaldisciplineThere's an entire collection of books that have grown up around Bungie/Microsoft's "Halo" video game franchise. Some of these books are strong and entertaining (if not exactly groundbreaking; the origin of the SPARTAN program was almost inevitably cribbed liberally from Ender's Game because there are only so many ways you can take four year olds and turn them into super-soldiers).
Seeing Greg Bear's name on Halo: Cryptum - The Forerunner Saga, the deep history and origin story of the eponymous artifact, gave me high hopes... hopes which Mr. Bear spent three hundred and forty two pages alternately baffling, boring, or bullshitting to death. Honestly, I was kind of stunned to see "342" there; between the large type and the lack of anything meaningful happening, I would have pegged it at around 200 pages.
I don't have high standards when it comes to novelizations of pop cultural content. However, some kind of coherent narrative, interesting action, or the first fucking idea of what the characters look like (four species, one of which apparently has dramatic caste differentiation) would be nice. What action there is is frequently elided or barely described, and there are disturbingly large swathes of shit that sounds kind of pertinent that are inconveniently shoved behind the couch or swept under the rug with the cheap out of "My memory of these events has faded."
I'm pretty sure that stuff on the scale of civilization-altering cataclysm is going to tend to stick with a guy.
I'd like to have seen something grittier, more in keeping with the tenor of the game and the other books in the series, for one thing. The protagonist didn't have any agency - stuff was entirely done to him, which was boring and irritating. There were some interesting ideas brought up, but none of them were explored in any depth, or even shown off all that well.
Zero galaxy-sterilizing superweapons out of five.
Seeing Greg Bear's name on Halo: Cryptum - The Forerunner Saga, the deep history and origin story of the eponymous artifact, gave me high hopes... hopes which Mr. Bear spent three hundred and forty two pages alternately baffling, boring, or bullshitting to death. Honestly, I was kind of stunned to see "342" there; between the large type and the lack of anything meaningful happening, I would have pegged it at around 200 pages.
I don't have high standards when it comes to novelizations of pop cultural content. However, some kind of coherent narrative, interesting action, or the first fucking idea of what the characters look like (four species, one of which apparently has dramatic caste differentiation) would be nice. What action there is is frequently elided or barely described, and there are disturbingly large swathes of shit that sounds kind of pertinent that are inconveniently shoved behind the couch or swept under the rug with the cheap out of "My memory of these events has faded."
I'm pretty sure that stuff on the scale of civilization-altering cataclysm is going to tend to stick with a guy.
I'd like to have seen something grittier, more in keeping with the tenor of the game and the other books in the series, for one thing. The protagonist didn't have any agency - stuff was entirely done to him, which was boring and irritating. There were some interesting ideas brought up, but none of them were explored in any depth, or even shown off all that well.
Zero galaxy-sterilizing superweapons out of five.
