Some people may have noticed that I'm a little wierd. I'm also a bit of a nerd, as my DragonCon reports and my JMS blog of today might tell you.
However, I want to discuss a little bit about one of the most epic bits of science fiction storytelling I've seen outside of Baen publishing.
The Halo video game franchise.
Yup. Video games can have epic writing.
If most of you are thinking "Thanks. We've seen Super Mario Brothers, there is no writing," I respectfully suggest you get your head out of the 80s. And parts of the 90s.
I've only recently been brought back into the world of video games by my friend Jason. He started by giving me a video game called Halo. It was a "first person shooter," which I always figured was short for "a game with no plot, but you get to shoot up anyhthing that gets in your way, or blow them up if you have grenades."
Then I started playing it.
It had a story. It had supporting characters with personalities. It had witty chapter titles and sarcastic one-liners. It was a space-sprawling epic played out on something that resembled Larry Niven's Ringworld
-- an artificially designed planet called Halo.The premise was simple enough: alien jihadists called the Covenant have discovered humans, and they really, really don't like us. The game starts with the player's ship on the run from an alien armada, and runs into Halo, a world that turns out to be a sacred artifact to the jihadists. The player's character is a bioengineered super soldier called a Spartan-II, and wears a Mjolnir battle suit (yes, it's named after the hammer of Thor). The humans get the bright idea to take over Halo before the Covenant do -- this artificial ring world is a moon-sized weapon, after all.
And then, the humans wake something up. Not quite an eldritch horror from beyond time and space, but good enough for government work. Let's just say that they're called The Flood and leave it there. They have a tendency to devour, well, everything.
After waking up said horror, another side to this little war comes up. The artificial intelligence of the Halo ring discovers that, "Hmm, the Flood creatures have been let loose. We have to stop them."
It turns out that the eldritch horror isn't from beyond time and space, but from one hundred million years ago. The Halo rings were built to stop them. But, the people fighting the flood back then decided to hold on to a few samples for research, and so the species wouldn't die out (I always knew rabid environmentalists would be the ruin of us).
All goes perfectly well until the player discovers how the Halo rings kill the flood-- by erradicating all life bigger than a microbe. The flood starve. End of problem. When the Spartan-II and his sidekick object to this plan, the AI that has been chattering at you for a whole level of the game turns nasty.
Did I mention that the AI is insane?
Soon, the game becomes a four-sided battle. Alien jihadists are still trying to kill you. The flood are trying to kill everyone. And the AI that you've pissed off has his own army of flying, laser-wielding drones who are also out to kill you, the flood, the jihadists, and everything else in its way.
And that's just the first game.
The Halo universe is so dense in background and in story, they've written at least half a dozen novels worth of material, and they're making more. Comic book and Star Trek favorite Peter David
has written a comic book volume from the Halo-verse, as has William C. Dietz
, another author with his own writing credits -- though the first author to be offered the job was Timothy Zahn.SPOILER ALERT.
There might be one or two people upset by the end of Halo 3. The third game sought to wipe out the Flood, end the war with the alien jihadists, and finally end the threat of the Halo rings. By and large, they succeeded.
However, the character you play, the Spartan-II, is last seen drifting in space in half a starship -- bad things happen when a wormhole closes and the ship is only halfway through it.
Since Halo 3, several Halo games have been released -- prequels, side-stories, and tales that never answered the simple question: Whatever happened to Master Chief, Spartan 117
Halo Fans will be happy to know that the trail for Halo 4 starts where Halo 3 leaves off.
." And the second book is 
.
And Prince Roger is a royal bastard.
However, when the Empire's enemies, known simply as "the Saints," try to assassinate him by blowing up his ship, Roger and his bodyguards are marooned on the backwater, the hostile planet of Marduk. The terrain is hostile, half the population is hostile, and -- oh, yeah, did we mention that the tropical humidity makes the plasma rifles explode? What do you expect when they're produced by the lowest bidder?
You can never say that Ringo makes it easy on his characters.
.
Starting with 
, it was one of the few modern novels at the time I had encountered protagonists who thought. Not just a passing thought, covered in Italics, but whole paragraphs of tactical thought and maneuvering. And sometimes for entire pages. Shootouts in space and in infantry tactics had become chess games with lasers and missiles. And the antagonist of the piece was brilliant; the conversations between him and his side kick looked like Sherlock Holmes and Watson with a tactical manual.
-- which appeared in the first "prequel" movie. Lucas made droids with little shields, 
. Lucas went back in time, Zahn went back in time, and, while Zahn couldn't make Anakin Skywalker interesting, 
.
And, in true George Lucas fashion, he took everything that Zahn created, and promptly ruined it ... read the most recent Star Wars novels, and you'll see why. Zahn and an author named Michael J. Stackpole had come up with a concept to expand the Star Wars novels into a kind of Next Generation series ...
novel is set in the past, before the first and second movies. I would rather read his take on the rise of the most brilliant tactical leader the bad guys ever had, than read one more petty, pedantic, grim novel set around Lucas's regular Star Wars novels. It also includes the funniest group of rogue stormtroopers you've ever seen, and possibly the only ones who have the ability to shoot straight.
At the start of Zahn's career, he started a series called 
.
, one of his later series, was a multi-generational epic involving and examination of guerrilla warfare, high-tech implants, and what do you do when soldiers come home from battle.
... which is not a multi-generational epic, but takes place over a single month.
was an interesting one-shot....
In another end of the Zahn Galaxy is the 
. The intergalactic train system is run by a mysterious race called the Spiders. No one knows anything about them and there's a good reason for that -- they're actually a front for an older species, one with a hidden agenda, and a secret so deadly that the entire universe really is at stake. A secret army has been gathering in the shadows for decades, leading into a cold war that's about to warm up.
's Michael Weston, he's a spy who's been burned by political superiors who have decided that he's too inconvenient to have in government employ. When a billionaire's messenger drops dead on Frank's doorstop, in perfect 
fashion, he has to hop a train in short order.