Halo: Contact Harvest: Volume 5

Excelente calidad

This is the fifth novel in the Halo series and it is a kind of prequel to the earlier volumes. This volume is written by Joseph Staten, whose style is rather different from the authors of the other volumes I’ve read.This novel focuses on Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson who appeared in The Flood, the second novel in the series. It is set about 25 years before The Flood, though, and begins with Avery and his comrade in arms, Staff Sergeant Byrne, hunting down the insurrectionists who are rebelling against colonial rule from Earth. Both of them are then assigned to train a couple of platoons of militiamen on a planet called Harvest – the name indicates its role as the breadbasket of the empire. It’s while they are training these recruits that Avery and Byrne make first contact with the Covenant. This leads Avery to encounter another first contact: the naval intelligence officer, Jilan al-Cygni. She is the only female character in the novel. Notably, there are no female recruits in the militia, despite the fact that we’ve already seen female Spartans and women in a variety of combat roles in the earlier novels. This novel was written in 2007, so in that respect – the scarcity of female characters – it already feels dated. This leads me to one of my perennial gripes about the Halo series: that despite the fact that they are set 500 years in the future, with massive advances in spacefaring and other technologies, the humans’ military hardware – and their military tactics – feel very twentieth century. Given the brain power of the AI in these novels, the technology must be there to run wars against rebels and aliens using software and drones rather than human beings, but obviously humans in combat is a major feature of the series.Having said that, this novel has less combat and more plot and character development than the earlier novels. It also gives us a lot more insight into the various creatures that make up the Covenant. I’ll quickly get another gripe out of the way: this writer uses the aliens’ own terms for themselves rather than the names that humans gave them, as in the earlier novels (names like Hunters, Jackals, Prophets etc.), so it can be slightly confusing: are these the same creatures we’ve seen before, or new creatures? Having said that, the chapters involving the aliens are well done and I especially liked the friendship that develops between the Unggoy Dadab and the Huragok Lighter Than Some. We also learn that it’s almost by accident that the Covenant’s top species, the San’Shyuum (Prophets), decide that humanity must be wiped out rather than press ganged into the Covenant like the other creatures that make up the Covenant’s lower orders. It’s the result of complex politics and even more complex theology.I’ll say no more about the plot. Readers of the earlier novels know that the first contact with the Covenant leads to a galactic war that threatens to destroy humanity.I’d recommend this novel to anyone who plays Halo, or anyone who likes a bit of sci-fi escapism.

ottimo capitolo per iniziare a capire la trama della saga di halo, consigliato ai fan

Nickel !!!

The book starts of slow...describing the character of Avery Johnson...then it shows why he is a man of steel...at first it looked slow and boring but then the story makes head way for the initial war with the covenant ...gets very interesting after the introduction...worth the read...go for it..!! Respect Johnson ....