- ROBERTO jh
- |
- Fabled Heroic Member
Best to worst and why:
1) Human Weakness. Terrific insight into the characters of Cortana and the Gravemind. Keeps your interest the whole time and not a single sentence is an action scene. Really conveys how utterly demonic and twisted--yet horrifyingly intelligent--the Gravemind is and how comparitively frial and insignificant Cortana--and by extension, the human race she's based off of--really is.
2) The Return. Again, great insight into the post-Halo 3 situation and the post-War Elite mind set and problems. Very well written with descriptive scenarios. Not overtly action heavy, but the one action scene it does have is awesome. Also gives great clues as to what the future of Halo brings. Only reason its not numer 1 is that I can have only one #1.
3) Both Pariah and The Impossible Life are interesting because of who's being studied. You've read Pariah but the Impossible Life is a great new way to turn a series of official documents and reports into a gripping character study of Admiral Preston Cole. See, Eric Nylund, its author, never struck me as being very good at portraying emotions and characters on a level we can connect with, but he is good a posing moral questions and having emotions implied. So he took that and did something brilliant: rather then creating a standard narrorative, he crafted a literal psychoanalysis of Prestion Cole to uncover who he was as a man mixed with great space battle scenes and one of the single most brilliant moves I've seen in science-fiction combat history (for those who read the story: the star)
3) Dirt was an epic recounting of a soldiers life in the corp and asks questions like greed vs humanity. Its fourth only because I had more to say about Impossible Life, but really they're tied.
4)Palace Hotel. I'm one of the only people who liked it, but I liked it because it explained who the Chief is as a person and how he thinks when faced with regular humans. Also gave us a possibility that he may have been "in love" with someone from his past. Good thing is, is that it's not overdone the way some geeky, sweaty fan-fic writer might do it.
5) Mona Lisa was good to portray the horror of the Flood, but for me it was just far to long for what ultimately ammounted to a slasher movie. I think the motion comic of it will be
good since horror is best left as a visual medium though.
6) Stomping on the Heels of a Fuss was interesting I guess, but you already read it. Never struck me as anything "new" though. We already read all about the Brutes in Contact Harvest.
7) Midnight of the Midlothian I found to be pretty "meh." I can tell O'Connor's a good writer, but I couldn't help but get the feeling I was reading the walkthrough for a videogame (especialy when he "died" and "respawned" about half way through).
8) Blunt Instruments and Head Hunters I found to be boring. Headhunters was actualy the second story I started to read after Human Weakness (Karen Traviss' brilliant work on the Gears of War novels made me read her's first) but it was also the last one I finished.
Both of them just failed to make a connection, with one of them the characters not even having real names, just numbers.
From the Office technically isn't a story, but its probably the most insightful of the lot. It sets up some pretty interesting mysteries for the future of Halo...
[Edited on 02.26.2011 7:09 PM PST]