Halo: Glasslands [Paperback]

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.

I had not known much about Karen Traviss prior to reading this book. In fact, the first I heard of her was from a Twitter update, whilst on vacation, from San Diego Comic-Con 2009 when it was first announced that she would write a post war trilogy. So I went into this with no previous bias' for or against the author which, now that I have read up a quite a bit on her after concluding this novel, seems to be quite polarized in various fan bases, Star Wars being the first example that pops to mind. The reasons I think will become apparent by the end of this article.

The novel is broken into 3 plot threads, which all eventually intersect near the end of the novel. The main one could be said to follow the gang trapped in the Dyson sphere at the core of what was once Onyx. The second follows a team of ONI handpicked personnel called Kilo-5 whose purpose is to destabilize the Elite's delicate power balance. The final one follows an Elite by the name of Jul `Mdama who believes that Humans are vermin and must be exterminated, and who's goal in this novel is to kill the Arbiter to make that possible.

The first two in my opinion were okay, but nothing incredible. In the Onyx parts, much of the mystery of the Forerunners and the Dyson sphere is completely sidelined by the Halsey-Mendez arguments that take place. (Mendez apparently has had this deep seated resentment towards Halsey and her actions in the Spartan-II Program that is just coming out now) The Spartans - both the IIs and the IIIs - are relegated to barely being supporting characters. They are sort of there-sort of not, especially the Spartan-IIIs. The only one who gets any sort of development is Lucy, the traumatized survivor of Operation: Torpedo. I found her development more annoying than anything else to be honest. I could not help but feel as if she was used as another means to attack Halsey. The situation in mind was that Halsey was annoying some Engineers to get them to contact the UNSC. The Engineers were refusing and given the stakes of the Human-Covenant war, and how the Dyson sphere could really help those stakes, Halsey was getting annoyed. Lucy however seems to forget the fact that the Human race is dangling by a thread out there and turns on Halsey, punching her to the floor in order to get her to stop antagonizing the Engineers. Lucy honestly felt like a hindrance at this point and sympathizing with her here was quite difficult. I get that this was perhaps supposed to draw to the readers attention that Humanity should take greater care in the way they treat other races now, and that the author is trying to get the readers to sympathize with them, but I honestly must admit that I found it difficult to give a damn about what any alien being thought when every single opportunity with the Elites was taken to give some striking, misanthropic diatribe on Humanity. Judging from what we have in this book, it does not look like it will ever matter how Humanity changes its attitude towards others anyway, they are still vermin to be wiped out, and probably always will be now after some rather new and unexpected reasons for continued prejudice, which I get at below. The arguments between Halsey and Mendez themselves are quite petty, no more ethically in depth than some of the forum debates that I have had on Bungie.net. Halsey appeared quite weak, not using her usual indomitable intellect and got kicked all up and down the Dyson sphere, figuratively speaking. When this concludes, we arguably know no more about that Dyson sphere than what we did when Nylund left us at the end of Ghosts of Onyx.

The Kilo-5 thread is slightly more interesting, but not by much. It consists of 6 members: A female Spartan-II washout named Osman, a civilian anthropologist named Phillips, a Spartan-II called Naomi, and 3 ODSTs called Vaz, Mal and Devereaux, the latter of which is also female. The sixth is a smart-AI called Black Box, or BB for short. If you have read Cryptum then you will understand the following comparison that Kilo-5 basically undertakes an adventure similar to Bornstellar's where they go to many different locations: Sanghelios, Venezia, Earth, a glassed colony called New Llenapi. We see little snippets of what the galaxy looks like in the wake of the battle of the Ark. I say little snippets because it is nowhere near as in depth as such a complex time period requires to do it justice. Post Halo 3 is a multi-faceted time period. You will have the UNSC and how it is rebuilding, you will have their feelings of the war, how they are reacting to the Forerunner legacy left to them and what the Insurrectionists are doing. Then you have the various Covenant races and their internal issues, and how they take to the idea that all they have done is a lie. We only really see the Elite's domestic issues, and little bits of how the UNSC is coping as a whole. We do not really get to see, even as a broad sort of overview, what the current state of the UNSC is, how they are handling their new found legacy and what the current state of the other Covenant races are. We do get to see the Elite's a bit in depth, but I do not think that the novel did them justice either in its own way and I will get there soon. We also see a little bit of Insurrectionist plot on the colony of Venezia, but it is at most only a chapter or so near the very end of the book, and their motivations and little inter-species society that they have set up there are not explored. A significant part of Kilo-5's viewpoint is torn away to Halsey hating instead.

The fact that a full third of the novel is already essentially devoted to Halsey and her actions with the Onyx sections is only a part of what went wrong here. This is the section of the book where the infamous Dr Mengele analogy is made by one of the ODSTs. Now, regardless of whether you think Halsey's actions were not just immoral in principle but plain monstrous as implied by that analogy, I cannot help but wonder if it is much too forced at this point. Think about it: The Spartan-II Program took place almost 40 years ago with respect to these characters; it affected 75 kids with whom these ODSTs had, as far as can be told, absolutely no relation to whatsoever. The act is then smothered in the blood of the Human-Covenant war. This is an act so far displaced from the ODSTs in terms of time, location and relation, as well as being so outclassed in terms of evil by the horrid genocide of the Covenant, but this ODST is getting apoplectic at Halsey at times to the point of wishing to be a part of a firing squad that executes her? It was a bit too much for my suspension of disbelief. I cannot see anyone realistically feeling so angry at Halsey after the atrocities of the Human-Covenant war. Decry it for moral principles sake yes, but feeling uncontrollable anger now after everything? Hmm.

The final thread is that which follows the Elite, Jul `Mdama. He is a Ship Master with no ship. This crops up a lot. Their society is essentially failing. Without the Prophets and Engineers, they cannot create, replace or repair advanced technology. The Prophets even supplied them with their food, which is in danger of failing too. Everything from farming to physics has to be reconsidered from scratch as all they have specialized in is warfare for thousands of years. We see that their society seems to be largely tending towards skepticism of the faith in the Forerunners, (The Great Journey is dead and buried, now the Forerunners are losing their favour) and a dissident faction, the one that Kilo-5 is attempting to arm to start a civil war within the Sangheili, is attempting to bring the Elite's back to the faith by eliminating the Arbiter, who is seen by them to be the figurehead of this new zeitgeist. Jul is not really religious, but he opposes the Arbiters ideas to try to co-operate with Humanity. Jul wishes to exterminate them, and he is not alone in this regard either. So he joins up with the dissident faction as they share a common goal; killing the Arbiter.

This is all we ever see. It myopically focuses on these Elites, with no other viewpoints being shown. No changes in opinion, no zeitgeist with respect to Humanity and no second guessing their actions in the war. No guilt or regret or anything. No characters with any sort of emotional depth or moral conscience on them. It is all "Humans are vermin and killing them is cool". It also appears that most of the Elites are only staying their blades from continuing the slaughter of Humanity because they no longer have the resources and ships to do so. Gone seems to be the idea placed by Halo 2, Halo 3, Conversations from the Universe booklet and later the Cole Protocol that gave us the idea that they doubted their war with Humanity, the faith they served and the Prophets teachings, and the idea that they had an admiration for Humanity's plight born from traditions that were said to be heavily ingrained into their cultural mindset; the respect for tenacity, fortitude and cunning. Now Humans are devious liars, cockroaches to be stepped on. In fact the devious liars part is over done to the point where it is not just some zealous quip, but a full blown stereotype that Humanity seems to have earned itself throughout the galaxy: Humans are the ultimate liars of the Milky Way Galaxy. This, much like Mendez's anti-Halsey sentiments, appears to have come from nowhere, and is the powerful and new force of prejudice (Out of the blue yet made to look as if it has always existed in the story) that I referred to above. The Prophet of Truth excommunicated and then tried to exterminate the Elites because he viewed them as too smart for their own good, and the idea of them questioning the war became a threat to the point where he was forced to purge them all. Yet the implications of this are glossed over. This is the part where the authors tendency to only look at bare facts - the Who, the When and the Where - and then use, as she puts it, "psychological profiling techniques" to re-build characters and factions from the ground up, come in. 30 years of war and genocide would be reflected by what you read in Glasslands with respect to the Sangheili if you took it out of context with the rest of the story, but the Great Schism was caused by Truth becoming concerned about a growing shifting zeitgeist, which has been somewhat erased by the authors interpretation of what 30 year war must necessarily mean in the Haloverse.

As a final example of skewed character/faction behavior, take the relationship between Brutes and Elites. It ain't pretty, is it? Yet in this novel we have Brutes all buddy-buddy with Elites, living on Sanghelios trimming trees. Brute landscapers, I kid you not. The reason is because these Brutes were apparently too scared of the Elites to rise up with their brothers and viewed them as their Alpha Males, thus explaining why they stayed put with the Elites, but even then I find it a bit too much and slightly irrelevant.

There will be a few major spoilers in this paragraph, so be warned. The only revelations that are made in this novel are in regards to the future of the Spartan Program and the future of the UNSC fleet. Specifically, there is a ship called the Infinity which is enhanced with Forerunner technology. It simply namedropped with no explanation or description. This is all we know, nothing else. There are Spartan-IVs too - not elucidated upon either with the exception that they use Adults rather than kids. ONI discovers Installation 03 which sounds like another Halo Ring - not elucidated upon. Kilo-5 is using a slipspace drive that can get them from Earth to Sanghelios in reasonable time, in comparison to the days when going from Harvest to earth took weeks upon weeks. This is not expanded upon either. Mjolnir Mk VII (Seven!), just namedropped and not expanded upon either. The entire novel so myopically focuses on the downfall of Halsey that almost everything else is bumped off to the side.

Spoilers end.

Either that or we are being carrot sticked into buying the next installments, so my final opinion on this book is this: Wait until the next two come out to see if it is all worth it in the end. You are not missing anything crucial in this one in the slightest as nothing substantial develops and no revelations are properly introduced to us.

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.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 105 reviews  3.2 out of 5 stars