- ROBERTO jh
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- Fabled Heroic Member
Posted by: dahuterschuter
Posted by: ROBERTO jh
I've heard this before,
From me. This is my response in pretty much every "What did you think of Cryptum?" thread. And you're usually one to debate me on it. In fact, we always end up on opposite sides of things as far as I can remember Roberto.
Allow me to explain myself again. Yes the concept was pure imagination. Much like a six-year-old who starts playing make believe will have concepts which are completely imagination. The word imaginative is not measured by how much imagined things are in something. (That's not meant to be as biting as it may have sounded.)
The whole story was just disappointing to me. It seemed too linear, too done. The pre-human civilization human civilization concept is what I am mostly referring to when I say ill-conceived. I just have to ask, why? Why did that have to be? It didn't. The novel would have been perfectly fine without making up some super-advanced ancient human race. That's one thing that really got me in the book, was that the concept of the old humans was just so inappropriate.
And from a writing perspective, the novel had too much going on. So much. You've got the Forerunner, humans, Precursor, Flood blah blah blah blah blah. Sometimes a novel which has many plots can actually be riveted, but the author didn't pull it off that way. It seemed cluttered. As if he had a whole lot of ideas that he wanted to jam into one series, when really, there's enough to say about the Forerunner that he could have made the whole series just about them without tying in ancient humans so largely.
I don't mind knowing the past in the Haloverse, I just mind that now the information in Cryptum has become the offiial past in the Haloverse. It really is more like a fanfic than something that should actually be canon. Because of Cryptum, what had potential to be an amazing background is now ruined forever, unless someone wants to make a game about it, overriding Cryptum. And really, a story this big, a portion of the Halo story this huge and important, would be best told through a game. Because even I forget sometimes, that the Halo series is video games first. This sort of story should have been reserved for, and probably would have been told better, as a game.
In a trilogy, try not to expect much out of the first story. From a story perspective, its the weakest (usually), in that it sets everything up for the next two. Star Wars IV had the weakest story of the original trilogy, Batman Begins (of the two released) was inferior to Dark Knight in every respect, and so on.
I will agree on one thing though: it did seemed crammed in, and I sometimes would forget how we got to where we were. It seemed rushed, which is surprising coming from one of the greatest Sci-Fi writers of all time, Greg Bear. Though Cryptum is the only book I've read of him, I know his reputation.
As for the whole thing about Ancient Humanity, a few things to consider.
For one, there needed to be some surprises in the book. Second, there needed to be some explanation for the Forerunners admiring us in the terminals. Third, there needed to be a reason for why we can subconsciously use Forerunner artifacts. We needed an incentive to take up the Mantle and so on.
If you look at the story of Halo as one massive tale, with each installment like its own chapter rather then a seperate story, it might make a little sense. Halo has alway been a mystery, always had fantstically deep undertones. If you look at it now, you can see that the contemporary universe and the Ancient universe are linked by humanity. We are the only constant, the only ones capable of unlocking the universes secrets.EG: The Forerunners can't understand or activate the Precursor artifacts, but humanity can activate and use them to an extent. The Covenant can't use Forerunner artifacts, but we can.
The contemporary universe is like humanity reachieving past greatness and reconnecting with their old selves, finding its role in the universe as guardians of all life. The Forerunners would have had little incentive to make us their heirs without us having proved worthy in their eyes. A bunch of cavemen with next to no technology don't make good universal guardians. A bunch of cavemen with the capacity to do create a vast interstelar empire does.
The only other obvious race to inherit this duty would have been the Prophets, but they're too self-serving to hold the job.
Plus you have to consider the story bible likely had a lot of this already noted down, Bear just expanded on it. I'm just here as an observer, not one to make criticisms about a story thats not even finished yet. So lets just wait for Cryptum's 2 and 3 before we decide whether it was worth it.