Halo: The Flood

I decided to read the novelization of Halo: Combat Evolved. Don't @ me.

The Flood is the second Halo novel published and the only novelization in the series' history--it is a retelling of the first game and a minor expansion of its story. I was an enormous fan of the Eric Nylund trilogy in high school but had intentionally avoided The Flood due to its negative reviews and supposed glut of action scenes; but, on a whim, following my "analysis" of Halo 4, decided to give it a go.

You may be wondering what possessed me to do this.

Well, I needed content for the book section of this blog, but that wasn't solely it. My true reasons were two-fold:

1) I believe Combat Evolved has a fantastic sci-fi military mystery story that could be adapted into an equally fantastic non-interactive narrative, and I wanted to see if The Flood author William Dietz had accomplished this.

2) I was morbidly curious as to what a prose adaptation for a video game might be like. How would it be written? How would an author handle countless repetitive action scenes that would be hard to pull off even in a film?

On these factors will I assess the novel.

But First: The Video Game Novel

I still possess a reticence to tell people I'm a "gamer." Perhaps I fear persecution for indulging in a habit that is now enormously mainstream, I don't know.

Reading is a "high cultural activity" in the US these days--that is to say, it is something that all of us pretend we do a lot more than we actually do. I'll confess that I don't read nearly as much as I should, although I do listen to a lot of audiobooks.

Reading licensed books is a different story.

For some reason, reading licensed books is a low cultural activity, not far removed from soap opera-watching. This presumably has something to do with their commercial nature: literature is art at its pinnacle, pulp is art at its most capitalistic. Dietz did not write The Flood because he had an idea, he did it because he was paid to do it.

But Michelangelo was paid to paint the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo was commissioned to paint the Mona Lisa. I think it's a mistake to write off licensed art. There may be great value hidden away within...the novelization of the first Halo video game.

Okay, it's a stretch. But you never know. Maybe Dietz is a secret genius?

The Book Itself

IT SUCKS.

#1. Is it a good story?

No.

#2: Is it well-written?

No.

The End.

Don't read it.

Okay, but seriously...

The Flood is split between actual new information on the story of Combat Evolved and a superficial, rushed, and ultimately uninteresting summary of Master Chief's ass kicking.

The general opinion among Halo fans is that the new information is good, the summarizing is bad. I don't really agree.

None of this book is good.

THE BAD

For an enormous fan of the first two games like me, the most disappointing thing about The Flood is the presentation of the Master Chief himself.

As I've argued elsewhere on this site, the main character trait of the Chief is that he is a man with no agency. He is almost machine. He is not really a perspective character for a novel; he is more interesting in third person.

But Dietz tries to turn him into a character.

Dietz's presentation preserves his sense of humor, which I appreciate, but otherwise turns him into a generic action movie soldier. Lip service is paid to the fact that he was kidnapped and abused as a child, but this isn't reflected in the character's speech. His dialogue is totally wrong. He isn't laconic. I can't remember the presentation of the Chief in the Nylund novels, but relative to the games, this isn't the same person. This is why the Chief's sections are so boring--not the preponderance of action.

He's much better with the dialogue for the other characters in the game. He does a good job with the voices of Cortana and Keyes. Unfortunately, his new characters are shallow and uninteresting.

The novel changes narration perspective constantly. Sometimes three or four times on the same page (and I read this on an iPhone, where the pages are tiny!). This means the story is dispersed between a huge number of characters and none are given the time they need to develop.

I'd like to give special recognition to the main Elite and Grunt duo, whose perspective we see regularly over the course of 400 or so pages, all building up to a dramatic confrontation with the Chief, who are killed in one sentence by a grenade. Great!

The book would have been much more interesting if it had stuck to only a handful of narrators. Were I the author, I would have chosen Keyes and Cortana. Maybe Foehammer. No one else.

Instead, we swap around with complete arbitrarity. It's very bizarre. It would be less bizarre if Dietz had simply adopted an omniscient style of prose, but he doesn't; instead each perspective swap is signaled by a page break, which is a baffling decision. I've never read a book that does this before. You would be told not to in a college-level English class.

My biggest problem with the story, though, is that it doesn't answer questions a player might have from the game--why does Keyes personally go with Johnson to discover the Covenant weapons cash before "343 Guilty Spark," what is Echo 419 up to between missions (especially at the end)--while introducing countless new ones. In fact it exacerbates existing questions. The plot of Alpha Base has basically nothing to do with the Chief's adventures and ultimately resolves itself in a single uninteresting paragraph. It doesn't mesh very well with the story of the game anyway, wherein the implication is that most marines are dead by the time of "Two Betrayals," and comes off as just filler.

Finally, the marines are too good. The Chief obviously wins every fight, which makes them pointless, but this is kind of the baggage of an FPS' novelization. What wasn't necessary was for the rest of the Autumn's crew to have godmode enabled.

The UNSC is supposed to be losing the war, but you wouldn't know it here. Major Silva and friends win every fight with minimal casualties. They would have escaped from Halo without the help from the Chief, were it not for one lieutenant deciding to blow their captured ship up to protect Earth from the Flood or whatever. I found myself actively rooting for the Covenant to win, which is probably not the intention.

The end result is that characters like Keyes and Johnson come off as inept, the Covenant come off as a joke, and there are never any stakes. We needed to see the human forces losing, with the Chief being the rock that saves the day. But that isn't the story we get. It's a huge shame.

So Who Cares?

The point of all of this is that Combat Evolved could be turned into a great sci-fi story. All of the elements are there. The plot needs to be shuffled around, but the basic concept, that the marines from Aliens have a pet Robocop and crash-land on an ancient alien doomsday weapon and need to escape, is fantastic. There's mystery, excitement, and a good cast of characters.

I've been imagining how one might adapt this story into a screenplay for many years now. It could definitely be done. It could even be done in prose. The details of the narrative would need to be changed, but the basic plot would remain.

Dietz's book, unfortunately, is not what it needed to be. It has very little going for it. It's just not interesting. I recommend you stay far away.