Halo: Mortal Dictata Author: Visit Amazon's Karen Traviss Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0765323958 | Format: EPUB
Halo: Mortal Dictata Description
About the Author
#1 New York Times best-selling novelist, scriptwriter and comics author Karen Traviss has received critical acclaim for her award-nominated Wess'har series, as well as regularly hitting the bestseller lists with her Halo, Gears of War, and Star Wars work. A former defence correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist, she lives in Wiltshire, England.
- Series: Halo
- Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: Tor Books (January 21, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0765323958
- ISBN-13: 978-0765323958
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I really enjoyed Glasslands. It did a great job of setting up a post-war Halo universe, and did an decent tying up the Onyx and Halo 3 story threads while also introducing some interesting new facets to the universe like the Sagheili homeworld and the potential renewal of the human civil war. Thursday War continued these stories, but the lack of the Nylund-era story arc made the novel seem a little more shallow, even if there was some interesting setup for Halo 4.
Now Mortal Dictata is out the door and Traviss has managed to strip out everything that was interesting from the previous books. Now, I don't want to say that I'm somehow against smaller stories in the Halo universe, but after Halo 4 essentially reset the expectation for where the Halo story was going, and Greg Bear detailed and ancient extragalactic war that tied together every loose end from the previous fiction, Mortal Dictata feels empty, lifeless, and completely unessential. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with the writing of the book itself, and it does a reasonably impressive job tying into and maintaining consistency with the established canon. However, there are two glaring issues with the novel that really break it for me.
Firstly, the core plot that moves the story forward revolves around a single Covenant battlecruiser falling into the wrong hands. Now, in universe a CCS cruiser is nothing to shake a stick at, but it took more than 300 Covenant ships to glass Reach, and presumably even more to make Earth fall, and that was at the end of the war when humanity was on its last legs. It's well established that humanity is now the dominant force in the galaxy, and Halo 4 featured a cutscene where the UNSC Infinity literally rammed a CCS cruiser and plowed it in half.
Quick Summary: Series should have been called: "Halsey = Hitler"; Family issues sorta resolved; 343/Microsoft should've picked a different writer.
And that really annoys me on so many levels.
Let me clarify: This isn't a BAD book. It isn't poorly written (although it's not GREAT either), there aren't major plot holes, it manages to remain consistent throughout the book and the Kilo-Five series as a whole.
But from the standpoint of what writers like Eric Nylund and Tobias Buckell (The Cole Protocol), among others, contributed to the Halo universe this is pretty... honestly, it's awful.
My problem with Karen Traviss is very simple: she took a series that was full of interesting, morally gray decisions and choices, and promptly proceeded to drive all over it. She grossly, grossly, grossly oversimplifies the SPARTAN-II program, spending a large chunk of all three books (thankfully less in this one) relating Catherine Halsey to Mengele and Hitler, effectively crucifying the character every chance she can find a few paragraphs to fit it in.
More to the point, her ENTIRE cast, down to the last man and woman and AI, all have the exact same thought process, effectively making Halsey the sole responsible party in having kidnapped, experimented on, and partially brainwashing children. This is amazing short-sighted and makes for some extremely unsatisfying, extremely long periods of reading, where NO thoughts of the other side. In only two cases throughout the series, BOTH of them in THIS ONE BOOK, does she even have a character remark that hundreds, if not thousands of other people participated in, and then promptly changes the subject back to "Halsey = Hitler".
It's just.
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