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Posted by: Lord Slade
Yes. Cryptum is more worthy of being canon than Halo: Reach or Halo Legends by far. It's easily the best Halo novel written to date.I disagree (but not about Halo Legends, that sucked hardcore, and Reach's story leaves much to be desired).
I think that Greg Bear is a pretentious prick. I can't stand his descriptive style, narration, or what he chose to do with the story of the Forerunners. Before he came along, the story was simple, clear, and yet shrouded in mystery. No novel ever should have been written directly about a Forerunner, or from the point of view of a Forerunner. That kind of kills every cool thing about them.
The story without Cryptum goes that the Forerunners encountered the Flood (read: encountered. Not engineered), an unknown horror, presumably come from beyond the Galaxy. This is one of the things that make the Flood terrifying: We don't know exactly where they came from. Are they remnants, defeated somewhere else in the 'verse? Or did they leave a Galaxy(s) full of Flood behind them, in which they've possibly run out of things to assimilate?
Either way, we know that that they were a horrific and cunning enemy, who managed to beat back the hyper-advanced Forerunners across thousands of worlds, both natural and artificial, until they were forced to build, and finally activate the Halo array, the seven ringworlds with a combined range to kill everything larger than a housecat across the entire galaxy, after indexing every bit of information about them and allowing the automated systems to replace everything that was killed (presumably with some incredible bio-tech, if their AIs, ringworlds, giant portals, and other derelict gadgetry have anything to say about whether they're capable or not).
Now, from what I picked up as implied in the games, humanity were the goddammed Forerunners (the gate to the Ark being on our planet and all), meant to pick up where we left off when we were ready. But, before we could even come close, the Prophets ran into some Forerunner tech while at war with the Elites, and used their discovery (with a few giant, blatant lies) to forge the beginnings of the Covenant. You know the rest; the Covies roamed the Galaxy like hegemonic snowball, acquiring species and worlds to use on their insane Jihad to suicide, with the Prophets kind of making it up as they went along.
Then came first contact. The Prophets flipped out when they found humanity (recognizing them for what they were), and attempted to annihilate us colony by colony, find a suspicious amount of Forerunner tech as they moved closer to Earth (and no-one but the "Heretics" putting two and two together, with the help of the monitor).
Anyways, to recap, there's no good reason for Bear to do what he did to the backstory. It was epic and reasonably mysterious as it was, even when explained. Extended universe that takes place before the main events of the games or initial novels should be ambiguous as a rule, as to not ruin anything. Like Cryptum did.