Forum:Halo: Mortal Dictata

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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)

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 | 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.File:Colonel Grade One.pngCol. Snipes450File: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 [Comm|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!--Spartacus ^{Talk • Contribs} 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^(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^(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? File:Colonel Grade One.pngCol. Snipes450File:Colonel Grade One.png 12:42, 21 January 2014 (EST)

A review

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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. --Jugus (Talk | Contribs) 13:32, 26 January 2014 (EST)