Halo: Cryptum: Book One of the Forerunner Saga

Greg Bear has a peculiar style, a sense of jumping right into the action and explaining later. Granted, I've only read Eon and Slant, but his peculiar take and writerly skill (apologies to Eric Nylund, but Bear is better at what he does) lends a feel more at home in Hard SF than MilSF. It works, too- Cryptum is an enthralling read and an extremely worthy expansion to the lore of the Halo universe.

In what reads like a last confession, Bear puts the reader in the shoes of Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting, a rebellious young Manipular who will advance to become a Builder, one who will be responsible for the grandest of Forerunner constructs. His journey rapidly morphs into one on which hinges the fate of the Forerunner civilization and galactic life itself. Bear draws his characters from the Terminals found on the Ark in Halo 3- Mendicant Bias, the Didact, and the Librarian all make appearances- and helps to put those in context, along with astonishing revaluations about the origin and history of humanity and the Prophets (San 'Shyuum as they are referred to in the novel) their earlier interactions with the Forerunners, and the origins of the Flood.

It's nice to have a non-militarySF take on the Halo universe, and doubly so to have that voice be Greg Bear's. Anyone who wants to get started on what's looking to be an excellent trilogy would be well-served to pick up this book.

Having grown accustomed to the tomes of Frank Herbert and Dan Simmons, Cryptum was a blink in comparison. That's not to say that it was bad however; quite the contrary. Being a connoisseur of Halo fiction, I can say with confidence the writing here is easily on a level all its own. Bear attempts to elevate Halo to a certain quality of literary fiction I've felt was long overdue for material with so much promise. Does he succeed? Almost. Maybe the action-centricity of Halo is too ingrained; maybe the story was just too short, but the personal quest didn't quite work for me. I can only report with surety that I never quite got the grandiose action I was hoping for, nor the deeply moving introspective revelation I was craving. Just when it was getting really good it ended. But of course this is to be a trilogy, so hold off on the judgements.

As a novel on its own merits, good but not great. As part 1 of a scifi opera, a very auspicious beginning. If you're a fan of Halo's fiction, this is the payoff to your dedication and the best reason thus for why we do what we do. With any luck part 2 will be something akin to Empire Strikes Back in its personal grandeur. I'm of the opinion Bear has the talent.

Halo Cryptum is the Halo novel's black sheep. Physically, because it's a hard cover book while the others have been paperback. But then the book itself is set long ago during the time of the Forerunners. No Spartans. No Covenant. No Earth. Finally, while the other books are action oriented, this one is not. Some have called it "hard" science fiction but I think of it more as philosophical science fiction. So how does the book stand up? Not well.

The move from action to philosophical isn't necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that it contrasts too much with the rest of the series. The book takes a Star Trek: The Motion Picture approach while the rest of the series is more Wrath of Khan. It's almost like a completely different story just using Halo names.

My biggest problem with the book is that there's no real description in the book. I haven't read Greg Bear's other books so I don't know if this is any different. However, I never got a real sense of what anything looked like. With Eric Nylund's books I could see everything like it was a movie playing in front of me. I could see every asteroid and the fields of Sigma Octanus. But Bear was so vague. If I hadn't played the games I simply could not picture any of the things going on. He also uses a lot of words that seem to have little context in the book, and quite honestly I shouldn't have to use XBox's Halo Waypoint to read my book.

My next biggest problem is that nothing really happens in the book. Mostly because the characters just aren't interesting. There's no one even remotely like Kelly, Linda, James, Halsey, Johnson, or Keyes. If they hadn't said the name Didact so much I would barely remember him as someone in the book. The humans are basically cardboard. Then, they don't really do much. Bornsteller spends the first half searching for something he doesn't really know what, and spends the second half following everyone else as they drag him around in situations he also doesn't know what's going on. The most interesting part is the coming of age for Bornsteller, but he doesn't really do much with it. The book doesn't really get good until the last third or so when it all hits the fan. Then things actually start happening, characters are introduced (though they're still just there for plot), and events are explained.

The problem with the Forerunners time period is that there's no reference for it. The games barely touched on them, only showing architecture and just briefly providing some history. To fully convey the time period, this book really needed someone who could detail the world to readers. Bear's very brief description would have worked well in the games's time period where fans already know what things look like.

The book is an odd piece. It's slow and vague, which will probably put off many of the fans who are used to fast paced action (after all that is what Bungie built Halo on), while non-Halo fans are probably not going to care about Forerunners, Arks, and the Flood since it's all so vaguely described. Halo: Fall of Reach just happens to be my favorite book. It greatly expanded on the games and did a terrific job doing so. Cryptum did not. This was not the book fans wanted or needed to explore this mysterious era.

I have long been a fan of the Halo universe and was anticipating the release of this book for some time. unfortunatley the author never develops a single character including the main character through out the book. The descriptions of the enviroment and items in it are so vague and beyond comprehension that I was unable to visualize a single piece of it. I wanted this book to be so much more but was sorely disappointed.

I just finished Cryptum and I am glad the punishment is over. Ponderous, dead prose, a beginning that is not a beginning. Whoever is responsible for the Halo canon should be fired for this debacle. Even as a science fiction novel with no expectations it is a fail. Nothing happens in the first 35 chapters. I have read every word of every Halo novel and this is an embarassment. The contract should have been given to Joseph Staten who wrote the best Halo novel Contact: Harvest. If I read any more of these books I will get them from the library.

Okay I just finished the book and thought I'd share my opinion on here.

I actually don't really like it. In fact I would say it's the lowest of the Halo series to me. Were I rereading every Halo book I might very well skip this.

The main reason is that the story seems INCREDIBLY random. Nearly all the events and action that happen in it come from out of the blue with no real reason other than the author wanted it to happen. It's almost as if he wrote a bunch of scene ideas down on scraps of paper, put them in a hat and would choose one at random when he felt like it. This isn't true of the entire book but most of it, so it seemed to me. The last 100 pages or so seemed more coherent. Another way to put it is that it seemed like the author was unwilling to share the plot of the story with the reader. Like it was some big secret he didn't want us to know about.

Also the descriptions of Forerunner tech didn't match completely with anything we see in the games. He had rooms rearrange for furniture, ships made out of hard light (it was stated that the first major ship ridden in was mostly made of hard light), and just other stuff that didn't seem to fit what we've seen. It was pretty cool on its own merit and had this not been a Halo book I would have liked it. It just didn't feel like Halo to me.

The characters seemed completely flat and lifeless. It's as if they were just going through the motions saying what the director (the author) wanted them to say. I don't feel any attachment to any of the characters, save one. Runner had a spark of personality but even that is muted. But they are just lifeless characters.

I did like the description of Forerunner life cycles though. The concept of mutating several times, with the help of another, into something is a cool idea for a race. I also didn't like that he was only 12. We were constantly introduced to characters who were centuries or millennia old, but this guy isn't even a teenager. In a culture with that long a life span (even with technology extending it drastically) a 12 year old would be considered to barely be out of diapers.

SLIGHT SPOILER PARAGRAPH!!!
I didn't like that the Humans had been a galactic power rivaling the Forerunners. One of the reasons Halo is liked as much as a franchise is that it's designed to be our world just a few hundred years from now. Adding this layer of history breaks that. We've never found any evidence that humanity progressed beyond cavemen before us, and if we were a galactic power 100,000 years ago we would have. There would be records of it the arctic ice, there would be ruined cities, there would be structures visible on other planets, there would be evidence. It would take a LOT of effort to remove all of that. If the Forerunners wanted to punish us by barberizing us it would have been easier for them to dump us on another world than to erase all records of our past (they made it a point to blatantly say they put humanity back on Earth).

SPOILER PARAGRAPH AHEAD!!
Oh, one major thing I disliked is that they gave the Forerunners the same exact relationship that modern Halo races have. The Forerunners had their own ancient, unbelievably advanced civilization they admired and coveted. What a load of bull! That completely undermines the premise of the Forerunners being a fantastic, nearly unknowable race. Suddenly now there is someone even better than them. Plus we've never heard of this other race before now, even though their stuff is "eternal". They even claimed their artifacts could survive plate tectonic, being pushed into a mantle and then forced back out ages later. That means the covenant SHOULD have found something of theirs, and that would have shaken them to their very core. Yes they can retcon and say the Covenant has found this stuff but it just smells of BS.
/spoilers

Final, SPOILER FREE thoughts, had this book had nothing to do with Halo, I likely would have just been indifferent to it. It's main problems still persist without the Halo license. But as a Halo book, I'm REALLY disliking it. I might read it again to see if things seem clearer to me a second time... but I might not.

I'm not sure why I even finished this incomprehensible rot. Bear's description, when it's there, of ships, transport, worlds and, well everything, defies any physics I've ever heard of. But then if you stretch out the time lines to tens of thousands of years, well......maybe. But what CAN'T happen is a natural progression of any species to something totally unrecognizable, say ape to man in 10,000 years. Take a population genetics course and get a grip. Further Bear randomly drops names for races, species and subsets of humans or at least humanoids with no explanation: Precusors, Prometheans, Manipulars, Forerunners, Builders, Librarians, Lifeworkers, The Didact and on and on. All tapped into "ancilla" some semi living, artificial intelligence that you WEAR and can re-build on a whim. This all leaves the reader filling in not just the blanks, but an entire canvas. wondering WTF. And it gets weirder with the Contender, and, get this the Mendicant Bias. YES, Mendicant Bias. Got that? Not me. Not too worry, though. Our hero suitably mutates and predictably gets his dream girl. No spoiler here unless you're not paying attention. He is then presumably at the top of the power and genetic heap. GEEESH. What crap. The book is the poster child for a Kurt Vonnegut quote:

"I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

In this case the urinal is Halo.

Completely pointless book. It was just 350 pages of rambling and nothing came about of it. We knew most everything it told us about already, and the new things it brought up were uncreative and mundane. What a waste of 15 bucks. I would love to get a refund. Terrible characterization, and overall a giant snoozefest.

I had hopes that this would read like a new full length scifi novel. I've read almost all of GBs novels, and consider myself a fan.
However, this book has a "phoned in" feel, with little character development. While there is plenty of action, is feels like afterthought, just "thrown in" as it was expected to be included. The book has a disjointed feel, as it is several small stories just put together withou cohesion. So put this fan down as disappointed!

thank you thank you thank you.

Halo needs to have this awesome expansion. Since Halo is now up there with Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and the Matrix, it's now time to shine.

5 stars, my utter highest recommendation.