188 of 204 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Title of the book should have been "Let's Crucify Halsey", November 1, 2011
Karen Traviss has a rather interesting history writing tie-in novels for a number of well-respected science fiction properties, from the wildly popular like Star Wars, to testosterone-laden splatterfests like Gears of War. She is known for ignoring important details from the canon and basically creating things from whole cloth to fill the gaps, out of fear of becoming too fond of and familiar with the universe she's writing books for and proceeding to coddle it lovingly or something dreadful like that.
I almost don't know where to begin. Some fans - me among them - say that Eric Nylund set the bar high with his neutral, technical-sounding tone and jargon-laden narrative and dialogue. In contrast, Karen Traviss's writing style is typical liberal arts major stuff, and hardly belongs anywhere near a work of military science fiction. Writers of her caliber have a tendency to turn grizzled soldiers into the Brady Bunch, making them seem like less of an actual military force and more of a family. You go from Nylund's books to Traviss's, and suddenly, all the characters have forgotten military hand signals, the NATO phonetic alphabet, call signs and the chain of command.
The early parts of the book deal with the formation of an ONI team to disrupt Elite society (or Sangheili, if you prefer; they're the big alien dudes with the four mandibles we all know and love from the games) by supplying arms to separatists and religious fundamentalists. That's interesting in and of itself, but there's more. The team is being led by an incredibly imposing woman named Serin Osman who could very well have ended up being a SPARTAN-II, but washed out of the program at the augmentation stage due to her body rejecting the surgery. They are accompanied by a SPARTAN-II (Naomi), three eminently forgettable Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (Mal Geffen, Vasily Beloi and Lian Deveraux), a civilian anthropologist (Evan Phillips) with an interest in Sangheili society who acts as their interpreter (probably the most unique and compelling character out of the entire cast), and an AI (named Black-Box) who prefers to manifest itself as a hologram of a box instead of the more anthropomorphic forms favored by most other AIs. I liked the AI quite a bit. His gibes and cynical comments got a chuckle out of me.
We follow Captain Osman and her ensemble as they sow discord in the ranks of the Sangheili, capitalizing on their differences in order to greatly reduce the threat they presented to humanity. She does it all at the behest of her mentor, the shady Admiral Margaret Parangosky (one of Nylund's characters from Ghosts of Onyx; basically like a mash-up of Margaret Thatcher and John Parangosky, if you can imagine something so terrifying), head of the UNSC's much-feared Office of Naval Intelligence (think CIA, but about ten times more unethical). The book also provides a few intriguing looks at Sangheili society, as well as how poorly they're faring after the dissolution of the Covenant's command structure near the end of the war. Their society had specialized themselves in fighting and fighting alone, leaving the other more mundane tasks to the other client races of the Covenant, who they employed as servants. Now that they couldn't rely on the other client races, they soon came to the horrific realization that they simply didn't have enough scientists and engineers to keep their civilization afloat. This ends up being far more interesting than anything else in the book.
The story also follows up on Catherine E. Halsey (the head of the SPARTAN-II program), CPO Mendez (the guy who trained the SPARTAN-IIs and IIIs) and a few SPARTAN-IIs and IIIs that escaped into the Forerunner Shield World at the end of Ghosts of Onyx, which is a massive Dyson Sphere contained within a dimensional bubble. Think of a giant panic room, and you get the picture. Well, to make a long story short, it's loaded with Forerunner technology. They sure stumbled on a real goldmine, they did.
By about the middle of the book, things start going pear-shaped. Serin Osman - who still carries a bit of a grudge against Halsey due to washing out of the SPARTAN-II program and later coming to understand Halsey's twisted, antisocial personality for what it was - starts spilling the beans on the program's details to the ODSTs and even the civilian specialist they brought along, who are understandably quite horrified.
Though the results of the program are difficult to argue with, the details would indeed sicken anybody. I can't imagine what it would be like to live in that world and learn that these power-armored men and women were abducted at age six, put through brutal training and experiments, and sent to fight an insurrection. Not the Covenant, but other human beings. That's just plain grotesque, as I'm sure you'll agree.
However, this is the point where my willing suspension of disbelief was obliterated. That's classified information she's spreading to unprivileged ears. Nobody talks about the SPARTAN-II program to anybody outside the ONI's circle of trust, which doesn't extend very far. The program was created with the tacit - if not explicit - approval of ONI, Parangosky, and every member of the Reach military brass involved in it. Here, Traviss pretends that Halsey was the only one who knew anything about the program's gory details, and that everyone else in the Office of Naval Intelligence was just an unwitting bystander. Nylund's version of Halsey was given carte blanche to do whatever it took to stop the rebellion in its tracks, and she delivered on that mandate with the wildly-unethical SPARTAN-II program. In a way, the results of the program were something to be admired; humans that could sprint at up to sixty kilometers an hour and pound a motorcycle in half with their bare hands, to say nothing of what they'd do to the not-so-fortunate individuals - human or alien - who stood between them and the completion of their orders.
When Nylund was writing, he gave you the impression that what Halsey did was indeed wrong, but left the audience to form their own opinions. Traviss does not. She almost immediately starts in by literally using her own characters as mouthpieces to compare Halsey to Mengele. I'm not joking; we're talking actual LITERAL Mengele references. It makes the book read less like a book and more like a forum debate between fans, or a piece of criticism on prior works in the series. Clearly, Traviss has some ideological differences with the character in question and felt the need to use her writing to slag off on and otherwise beat the tar out of Halsey with one indignity after another. Furthermore, she goes out of her way to depict the SPARTAN-IIs and IIIs as a league of damaged man-children and shrinking violets instead of the hardened, stoic, veteran super-soldiers Nylund gave us. Typical bleeding-heart stuff.
In many ways, this is where me and Karen Traviss differ on how the plot should be handled. Let me give it to you straight; I don't much buy into all that idealism crap. The world we live in is not ideal. It's full of sociopaths who get off scott-free doing horrible things to other people, leaving others none the wiser. Halo always struck me as one of those sorts of stories; the ones where the idea of karma didn't exist, and we weren't force-fed a bunch of annoying, preachy mumbo-jumbo that was clearly written just to satisfy the author's own conscience.
Traviss also uses more contemporary jargon. They use credits. She uses dollars. They say holo-vids. She says movies. They say Smart AI. She just shortens it to AI. She also has the Sangheili occasionally using human phrases and expressions and verbally calling attention to the fact that they're using human phrases and expressions. That's downright cringe-worthy.
In summary, I probably would have had a much higher opinion of this book if it weren't a Halo novel. Traviss's writing style is actually not that bad. It's quite engaging in places. On the other hand, I could barely shake off the urge to vomit at what she - and others like her - are doing to the Halo universe. They're taking a series that prided itself on its utilitarian, ends-justify-the-means aesthetic, and trying to turn it into literature meant to be "read by grownups" (whatever that's supposed to mean), as Traviss put it in her Twitter feed when she rebuffed a Halo fan's criticism. If you're reading this, Karen, I hope you understand that I find your treatment of the work to be infinitely more stomach-churning than anything Halsey ever did.
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42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Glasslands: Disappointing on a galactic scale., October 29, 2011
If you're looking for a post Halo 3 fix, you're going to be disappointed. While it's not clear within the opening chapters, the novel actually finishes around the same time as the memorial service at the end of Halo 3.
A lot of plot lines are opened, and because of this the book struggles to focus on one, often at key moments. Upon my first reading I just couldn't shake off the feeling that as soon as I got involved with one character, the storyline shot off to something completely unrelated.
Traviss tries to cram her view down your throat during certain moments, and it really is annoying - especially considering she doesn't care to get all the facts before doing so. An example of this would be during the book *MINOR SPOILER* it is expressed that Halsey is bad... if by expressed I mean every piece of dialogue paints her to be the successor of Hitler for what she has done *END MINOR SPOILER*. Really gets old. Fast.
In the end, it's worth a buy. The ending is very open minded, and a lot of questions have been asked without any real answers given. All the book seems to achieve is set up a background for a sequel. Disappointing? Perhaps. Bad? No.
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