Forum:Halo: Mortal Dictata

Cover and Title
As you can see we now have the new Halo: Mortal Dictata which I can't wait to read as I've already read Glasslands & The Thursday War. However, I can't help to think, who thought of this as a cover for a Halo novel? It's kind of unusual IMO. By the looks of it, I can only assume that the little girl on the front cover is "Naomi", starring at a Mjolnir helmet - in other words, her "future". I'm also gonna assume the title is a reference to The Didact. IDK. Anyway, its just a thought I had to get out there.-- Killamint  [Comm |Files ] 12:39, 9 July 2013 (EDT)


 * Nothing to do with the Didact. Also, cover is likely a placeholder. — subtank   12:45, 9 July 2013 (EDT)


 * Hey, I didn't know such an article existed. Well I guess that explains the title. If it is a place holder I guess it would be similar to Silentium where this shows only part of the actual cover.-- Killamint  [Comm |Files ] 12:48, 9 July 2013 (EDT)


 * Heh, it speaks volumes when people assume the cover to be a placeholder, only for it to turn out to be the real one. --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 00:49, 20 January 2014 (EST)


 * That is funny how that turned out ;) .-- Killamint  [Comm |Files ] 16:14, 27 January 2014 (EST)


 * The real question is how do the Insurrectionists plan to glass Earth with one CCS-class battle cruiser. Sure the UNSC is isn't exactly in tip-top shape but there's the Infinity and ODPs.--Alpha (talk) 08:06, 23 August 2013 (EDT)Alpha


 * I'm sure they don't intend to bring just 1 ship to Earth. They probably have more lined up. In fact they probably have a bunch of stolen UNSC ships and need the CCS cruiser for that particular task.-- Killamint  [Comm |Files ] 10:02, 23 August 2013 (EDT)


 * From what's been released so far, it certainly looks like Sentzke is relying on the Pious Inquisitor alone. There's several options: A: he tries to attack Earth and gets turned into Swiss cheese by Infinity and the surviving ODPs (turns out, he knew this would happen - going out in a suicidal blaze is the only way he can get closure for his lifelong torment), or B: the narrative grants the Inquisitor insane hax powers and Earth is powerless or C: Kilo-Five and Naomi intervene before he can do anything and dramatic character moments ensue. Whether he gets to Earth or not, I'm putting my money on the narrative operating under the presumption of option B; i.e. that the Inquisitor is going to be treated as a credible threat to Earth as opposed to target practice for Infinity. The way these books have treated technological capabilities and military strength so far has largely been "whatever the plot demands", so I wouldn't rely on logic or consistency in that area. --Jugus (Talk  | Contribs ) 00:49, 20 January 2014 (EST)


 * My guess is he needs a Covenant slipspace drive for its precision - even an ODP can't hit a ship if it's already in place, weapons primed, ready to drop hell if anything happens. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   03:02, 20 January 2014 (EST)


 * Possible. To its credit, the novel does make an offhand mention that Earth's defenses should be able to take the ship, though the ship in itself is treated as bigger of a deal than it should realistically be. --Jugus (Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 13:32, 26 January 2014 (EST)


 * Personally I'm hoping to read about Jul 'Mdama's forming of the Covenant remnant and Osman's ascension to CINCONI.Colonel Grade One.png Col.  Snipes  4  50 Colonel Grade One.png 13:46, 23 August 2013 (EDT)


 * Definitely! I just wish they explained some of this in Halo 4/spartan ops at least as a teaser for this book.-- Killamint  [<font color="Red">Comm |<font color="Black">Files ] 11:48, 25 August 2013 (EDT)
 * Personally, I really want to read about how Osman took "sweet" Margaret's place. Due to her extreme age, I'm guessing she probably died. But then again, maybe she just resigned. Guess we'll find out!-- 11:54, 25 August 2013 (EDT)

And I'm hoping for more Blue Team. I was sad to see them get left out of the previous book. Tuckerscreator (<font color="#008000">stalk ) 16:56, 25 August 2013 (EDT)


 * I'd rather someone save them for their own book. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   06:37, 28 August 2013 (EDT)


 * Why not both? =P --DC Ambrose (talk) 04:11, 1 October 2013 (EDT)


 * Honestly, because Karen Traviss is no Eric Nylund. I was one of the people defending her initially, but first Glasslands and then Thursday War left me feeling cold. They didn't have the same feel of epic space opera that The Fall of Reach, First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx had - and if you're going to a story about S-IIs, the best of the best even among Spartans, I think that is really integral. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   05:05, 5 October 2013 (EDT)


 * Makes sense. I've been seeing a lot of requests for Blue Team to appear in Spartan Ops. Since Nylund seemed to have a plan for their adventure inside Onyx, maybe it would have been better for Glasslands to not have covered what happened to them at all and leave that to their own book. Tuckerscreator (<font color="#008000">stalk ) 03:12, 20 January 2014 (EST)

T'vao
I was just reading chapter 3, and it seems like T'vao, where the Skirmishers are from, is not on Eayn, but another satellite all together, thoughts? Col.  Snipes  4  50  12:42, 21 January 2014 (EST)

A review
First off, I want to say that it's no secret that I have no love lost for this series and that I think Karen Traviss is one of the worse things that's happened to Halo over the course of its existence (right below Dietz IMO). So I wasn't expecting much from Mortal Dictata and not much is what I got; reading the book was more of a mechanical chore born out of necessity than it was a source of entertainment, an attitude that formed about halfway through Glasslands when I realized that this is how the series is going to roll.

I'll start with the good parts. As with the previous Kilo-Five novels, Mortal Dictata is at its best when characters are simply interacting with one another. This is one part Traviss gets right and her characters generally come across as natural and believable. What's more, unlike the previous two books, it genuinely felt like there was a plot to follow, instead of a random string of more or less connected events. I even found myself strangely engaged at times. The ending did suffer from the Return of the King syndrome in that it overstayed its welcome and could've been compacted further. As for the story itself, it was rather bare-bones. The Kig-Yar subplot started out as novel enough, but toward the end I found myself wanting to skip over those parts.

My lesser gripes from the previous Kilo-Five novels are present and accounted for, most prominently the way technological constraints are largely just handwaved away. As before, Huragok are used as omnipotent plot devices; if it really was that easy to install slipspace drives everywhere, why didn't the Covenant have them on all of their dropships? From the previous novels you get the sense that the Huragok are really good at fixing things, even improving them to a certain extent, but you never see them building anything that complex from scratch; proto-Brute Choppers hardly come close to an S-F drive. And how do they build those Forerunner-tier drives anyway? Cryptum tells us that Forerunner drives owe much of their accuracy and reliability to these special crystals that are only available in one place. And that's not even touching on how these things are supposed to be powered. Then there's annoying little bits that could've been averted with a better editor, like plasma torpedoes being discussed as if they're physical projectiles stored somewhere as opposed to immaterial collections of energy brought into existence at the instant the weapon fires.

What's more, I find it hard to buy the fall of the Covenant as presented in these books. This isn't any Earth empire we're talking about, it's a vast hyperpower that has been spacefaring for thousands of years. And yet we are to believe it falls in complete shambles in just a little over two months? And that humanity, of all things, is now stronger than the former heart of the Covenant war machine? That the Sangheili are mostly based on their homeworld as opposed to having thousands of offworld colonies and/or space habitats untouched by the war and stronger than Earth itself? That the Sangheili are such a silly caricature of the honorable warrior race trope that they literally don't know anything else but fighting? It's just that all this feels like a gross oversimplification of something that could've - and should've - been a richer and much more complex area to explore.

But, unsurprisingly, the parts that bog Mortal Dictata down the most are again the ones where Traviss dips into anything to do with Halsey. We rationalize it as a different perspective, ONI propaganda and lies - after all, that's the only way it can be reconciled with the Nylund era - but one doesn't need to look very hard to see the authorial voice behind it. I believe the heart of the problem is the intrinsically different way Traviss chooses to interpret Halsey's character; the version she sees is essentially a completely different entity from the Nylund!Halsey. And this is probably how you might end up viewing her character if you just study a sheet of hard facts without the subtext from the earlier novels, even if you have read the journal. This results in all kinds of awkward and irritating bits like Traviss' use of BB as a mouthpiece to disseminate the Halsey journal, or BB calling Halsey out on terminating Araqiel (for the second time in these books), portraying it as a cold-blooded murder and conveniently leaving out the fact that Araqiel was going to gas Halsey to death. In the end, this level of vitriol directed at a fictional character just ends up coming off as bizarre and off-putting.

But what bugs me the most is not the hate or the meta-ranting about the journal. It's the distortion of Halsey's established character to fit this caricatured image Traviss keeps railing against through her in-universe proxies. In Glasslands it took the form of the clone fiasco. In Mortal Dictata, we hear that Halsey lied to Naomi that her dad approved of her abduction and wasn't expecting her home. Now this wouldn't be all that bad, canon-wise - after all, a lie a small thing next to the tragedy of the program on the whole. That is, if it wasn't explicitly contradicted in The Fall of Reach, where it's specifically pointed out that Halsey forbade making up lies about the kids' parents for the obvious reason that if they ever found out the truth, they might turn against the UNSC. Because of this, the only logical conclusion is that Naomi got Rekall'd. When BB tampered with her brain, he implanted a fabricated memory in her head to turn her against Halsey in case ONI ever chose to deal with her. After all, ONI was the one suggesting all sorts of artificial memory tampering for the Spartan kids to begin with. And a proper S-II is still leagues above any other asset ONI might get their hands on, regardless of their compliant plants in the S-IVs' ranks.

I don't know if 343i truly is playing some long-term game of their own with Halsey's arc, and while it does seem so from Frankie's comments, Traviss certainly wasn't having any of it. She took every opportunity she had to express how she feels about Halsey and her program and she did it with a passion. And that's ultimately what made these novels not work for me. Omitting the Halsey stuff altogether would've certainly made them better, but even then I don't think I could've been able to ignore the lack of scale and the silly technology. In conclusion, I think the time, money and effort that went into this trilogy could've produced something so much more at the hand of a different author. The best thing 343i can do right now is to have their damage control prepped and ready to move in and salvage whatever they can. I can only hope they can do a better job in the future. --<font color="MidnightBlue">Jugus (<font color="Gray">Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 13:32, 26 January 2014 (EST)

Comments
Just thought a comment section would be appropriate. As for Karen Traviss and her hatred of Halsey, I think one needs to consider the root of her hatred: what exactly did 343i told her about Halsey before she started writing the Trilogy or, to be more exact, did they even care to provide precedent materials on Halsey to Traviss (as to ensuring consistency, notwithstanding her views on Halsey's actions and involvement with the SII Program)? — subtank   13:59, 26 January 2014 (EST)


 * I don't doubt that 343 would've been glad to give Traviss a copy of The Fall of Reach or any of the novels Halsey's been featured in. To get a proper idea of what her character is about you really have to read through the books, which Traviss openly states is not part of her MO (though it's clear she's flipped through the journal). Just like I doubt Lucasfilm told her to portray the Jedi as a sinister elitist dictatorship, I doubt all the hate was part of some higher-level decision. 343i probably told her to arrange for Halsey to be arrested and that's it, basically. Then Traviss takes a look at the basics of the Spartan-II program and sets off to set it right the only way she can. So I do think 343i had the precedent material thing covered. It's just that they don't seem to have much in the way of editorial control over the final product. Though who knows; maybe there used to be twice the amount of hate and it got cut down in the process? --<font color="MidnightBlue">Jugus (<font color="Gray">Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 14:47, 26 January 2014 (EST)

Well it's not like Halsey's a saint, she devastated hundreds of lives by kidnapping children and replacing them with clones doomed to die. Although, in hindsight this allowed the SPARTAN-IIs to save millions (if not billions) of lives. While that may make it one sided, don't forget people like Staffan Sentzke whose lives were radically altered because of Halsey's actions. Both sides have a valid point. Col.  Snipes  4  50  14:20, 26 January 2014 (EST)


 * Like I said, it's not the fact that given characters hate Halsey that bugs me (most of them have their reasons), it's the flagrant hypocrisy on part of many of said characters and the one-sided treatment that does a disservice to the complexity of the whole issue. In every other case of moral dilemmas in these books, the ambiguity is acknowledged or sidestepped. The Insurrection? Ambiguous. Both sides had their reasons. Arming the Sangheili rebels? Ambiguous, but bent towards justified by the narrative and its portrayal of the Sangheili. The SPARTAN-III program? Acknowledged to be wrong, but mostly ignored sans a few mentions. The SPARTAN-II program? Irredeemably, unconditionally wrong. Absolutely no middle ground. Halsey is an evil, unfeeling eugenicist who deserves nothing but contempt; never mind Parangosky and the ONI leadership who cheerfully funded the whole thing and held Halsey's hand every step of the way to the point Halsey had to keep them from getting too excited with things like surgically induced brainwashing. --<font color="MidnightBlue">Jugus (<font color="Gray">Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 14:47, 26 January 2014 (EST)


 * I liked it overall, barring the "Halsey is an unrepentant Satanazi" and "Huragok are dei ex machina" irks I've come to expect from the series. I appreciated Sentzke's ending, though it felt very familiar. I wonder wh - . I agree that the characterization of the original (read: Traviss-created) characters is the strongest part of the Kilo-Five books. I really empathized with Staffan, despite knowing objectively that the SPARTAN-IIs really were utterly essential to humanity's survival. I'm in the same boat about the Kig-Yar story arc, though; it had a strong start, but halfway through Chol Von had become nothing more than an extraneous plot device. Unfortunately, we're left hanging on Parangosky's plan to incriminate herself and everyone else associated with the SPARTAN-II project, which is brought up maybe three times throughout the trilogy. Still, it shows that Maggie acknowledges her guilt in spite of the S-III double standard.


 * Despite my generally favorable attitude toward the series, make no mistake: I'm definitely glad Karen Traviss is gone. Her meddling is nothing in comparison to her Mary Sue-ization of the Mandalorians, but it goes to show why you shouldn't hire a writer who brags about her unfamiliarity with the source material when she takes on licensed properties. No, Karen - Red vs Blue is not Halo. I wouldn't object to a Nylundian rewrite of the series, though that obviously isn't going to happen. -- Our vengeance is at hand. Gravemind.svg ( Talk to me. ) 16:56, 26 January 2014 (EST)


 * "Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb!" I tend to come across as supremely negative but as I said, there were times when I actually found myself liking it. Traviss shines when she's writing about her own characters (the times she's not using them as her personal soapbox anyway). I could see the series being much more enjoyable if 343i had just told her to write her own story. No Halsey, no Blue Team or Mendez, no throwaway Arbiter cameos and definitely none of that hamfisted and awfully convenient Didact foreshadowing. And a bit more editorial hand-holding to keep the Huragok from being that absurdly overpowered. That wouldn't leave much in terms of connecting threads to the games, mind you, but it would've been more suited given the author.


 * I agree that a rewrite is something that is completely out of the question; they'll never do it, not after all the investment 343i put into the series. The best we can hope for is ancillary fiction, even entire novels, to "patch" some of the more glaring issues and maybe just downright ignore the silly stuff. The Eleventh Hour reports gave us a glimpse of the kind of bigger postwar universe I would've loved to see imagined in an entire novel series as opposed to just a few little bits of fluff.


 * But I am definitely curious to see who they'll get to pen their next inevitable novels (and where they'll go, story-wise). I'm sure they're aware of the overwhelming demand for more Nylund, but that's entirely up to the man himself: I almost get the sense that he's sort of had it with Halo and wants to focus on his own creations. I could be wrong and maybe there's some backroom politics were weren't made aware of - it does strike me as odd that Frankie and co. were talking a Ghosts of Onyx sequel with him, only to hire a different author over the obvious choice. Creative differences? Or simply a schedule thing? And then there's Nylund's departure from Microsoft, not that one's job dictates who they can write novels for.--<font color="MidnightBlue">Jugus (<font color="Gray">Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 00:14, 27 January 2014 (EST)

Maybe that's why Joseph Staten is back at Microsoft. The official news suggests - to me, at least - that he's working on Halo, just not directly on the next game. I doubt he'd leave Destiny in the middle of production unless he's working on something really worthwhile for MS. If you're reading this, Mr. Staten, I'd really like another Avery Johnson novel. Pretty please. -- Our vengeance is at hand.  ( Talk to me. ) 00:40, 27 January 2014 (EST)

I can't really comment on this novel, since I haven't read it (and can't afford it for a while), but I can already tell that the Halsey-bashing is going to annoy me. I didn't mind most of the rest of the other books - I liked her original characters, even Osman, and I've started to come around to the idea that Parangosky's hypocrisy was deliberate - that we're meant to be outraged at it, and to think that they're just as bad as each other. Because that's what I'm left with.

But what really still irks me is that she gives (or gave, at least) no time to Halsey's perspective, and didn't care to. I've never thought she was squeaky clean - Nylunds books paint her as a monster, but one who knows she's a monster. She has always known that what she did would send her to hell, if she believed in it. She spent so much of Fall of Reach and First Strike rationalising it to herself, but she knew it was all full of shit. It's something she's regretted. I loved Halsey because she was a bitch and knew it, and that just went unacknowledged. It's as if Traviss never even took the time to read the Nylund books, and I'm nearly convinced that this is true, since she herself has commented that she doesn't like doing that kind of research when she writes. And really, that's the core of my dislike (not hatred, but certainly no love lost) of Traviss as an author - she just doesn't care about what she's writing about beyond her own little corner of it. And that's okay for an original series, but when you come into a franchise, you need that context so things don't seem jarring - which was what the sudden turning of everyone around Halsey seemed like.

Also, now that a plot summary is up, I have to say...what changes? I don't mean with the characters, because I'm sure that part is done well. But I mean with the status quo between Earth, Venezia, and the former Covenant. The first K5 book set up the Covenant's resurgence, and Thursday War continued that and set up Jul 'Mdama to take it over. And we got our glimpse of Venezia, with hints that it could change the balance of power. But by the end, from everything I've read, things end up exactly in the same state, frozen. Does the Venezia threat get neutralised, set up as a point of contention between humanity and Covenant, or stirred up like a kicked hornets nest? Maybe this is just something that was lost in translation from novel to summary. Or maybe I just need to read it again. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   03:21, 27 January 2014 (EST)


 * It's implied that Staffan Sentzke is happy enough with the closure he got and will leave Earth alone. That's just him, though. But since he was a quite major player in the rebel scene on Venezia, he could have some influence on the colony's foreign policy. That is assuming he isn't faking the whole thing, of course, and planning to resume his murder-crusade at the first opportunity (unlikely, given the resolution to his arc). On the Sangheili side of things, there's nothing on Jul 'Mdama and his Covenant, and barely anything on the Abiding Truth, other than that Jul's son has become 'Telcam's apprentice. Any action in the Sangheili insurrection seems pretty low-key. On the whole, it doesn't seem like the status quo has changed much during the three months of this trilogy. No one died, Kilo-Five hasn't split up, though some of the chapter heading quotes suggest that Phillips becomes a (part-time?) lecturer for aspiring Section II personnel. --<font color="MidnightBlue">Jugus (<font color="Gray">Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 04:24, 27 January 2014 (EST)

The only changes that seem to have happened are only mild developments for the EU, and little that will affect the games themselves. Which is a big shame. From the pre-release of Staffan's threats, I thought this book was building up to the breakout of a second Insurrection. But nothing. The Innie threat seems to have fizzled out here, when it seemed to be heading in the direction of a full out schism among humanity. Tuckerscreator (<font color="#008000">stalk ) 13:43, 27 January 2014 (EST)


 * Disappointing. I viewed the previous two as setting up the resurgent Covenant remnant as a threat, and I thought this novel might perhaps pay off Telcam and Mdama, with Mdama hijacking Telcam's Covenant, perhaps revealing his collaboration with ONI in the process, setting up tensions between the Arbiter's forces and the UNSC, with Hood embarrassed and enraged at Parangosky's double-dealing. It looks like that isn't going to be happening, if this is the last Traviss novel. A shame. --  Qura 'Morhek   The Autocrat     of Morheka   23:44, 28 January 2014 (EST)

Dr. Halsey and Lies: A Conspiracy Theory
I already touched on this in the above, but I thought the topic might warrant further attention and/or speculation, even if it's probably going nowhere (the best-case scenario is probably going to be 343i completely ignoring this bit in future media). In Halo: The Fall of Reach (page 29 in the 2001 edition), we hear the following exchange between Dr. Halsey and Déjà just before the SPARTAN-II children are first brought into the amphitheater of the Reach FLEETCOM Military Complex: ''"I'm forgoing your recommendations, Déjà. I'm going to tell them the truth." (...) "The truth has risks," Déjà cautioned. "So do lies," Dr. Halsey replied. "Any story fabricated to motivate the children—claiming their parents were taken and killed by pirates, or by a plague that devastated their planet—if they learned the truth later, they would turn against us."''

Halsey says no to ONI's suggestions to fabricate stories about the kids' parents, for reasons that make perfect sense. Yet, for some reason, in Mortal Dictata, BB has a recording of Halsey lying to a six-year-old Naomi in the first days of Spartan indoctrination that her father won't be coming for her and that he's actually in on the whole thing. This provokes a predictable reaction of hatred against Halsey in Naomi (which is where TFoR Halsey got it wrong apparently - she thought they'd turn against us, in plural, ONI or the whole of UNSC, but it seems they just turn against Halsey personally when that happens).

Now, I'm sure Karen Traviss meant every word because if there's an opportunity to make Halsey look bad you bet she'll take it, but, what if this conflict could be explained another way? If you're listening, 343i, you're totally free to use this. Tinfoil hat time. We know ONI's out to tarnish Halsey's reputation and dump all their own dirt on her every chance they get. So what if ONI, with the aid of AI-assisted photorealistic video fabrication, forged a whole bunch of "evidence" to further incriminate Halsey, even turn her former allies against her? We also hear that the Mortal Dictata recordings show the kids fighting back considerably more than Halsey indicates in her journal - this one is more justifiable and actually makes a bit of sense, but it can easily be construed to support this theory as well.

BB's videos very conveniently show exactly what Naomi needs to see, from ONI's standpoint; she's just finished chatting with her father for the first time in decades, and then BB hands her a video of Halsey lying about her father. And she has to rely entirely on these videos because she still can't remember the details. That's awfully good timing. Hell, BB himself could've made (and/or altered) the videos in his spare time if it wasn't a Section II project, probably as part of a neatly-arranged "Halsey Media Packet" in the event Parangosky decides to go public with the whole thing. --<font color="MidnightBlue">Jugus (<font color="Gray">Talk  | <font color="Gray">Contribs ) 11:50, 29 January 2014 (EST)