Halo Encyclopedia

I've spent a couple of weeks reading the Halo Encyclopedia in drips and drabs. I've read chapters in a sitting and only a few pages in another. In the end the book lives up to it's title in a lot of ways that were intended and in ways it might not have been. It's intended as a book for the holiday season but it's also a reference work for one of the most successful video game studio's master creation.

For the hard core, mildly obsessive lovers of all things Halo there's new material here to spur discussions while walking paper routes with friends or arguing in dorm halls. Be warned that it draws heavily from the fiction and backstory already published in the licensed novels of the Halo universe. (The author of the encyclopedia is also the author of one the novels.) There are new nuggets here and there so Halo scholars will have new things to ponder. With detail dripping off of every page it can be mildly overwhelming to those just dipping their toe in the water but...Read more

While the content of this book is fine, what especially shines is the incredible, paradigm-shifting foreword. The author manages to encapsulate, in a few hundred words, the most profound, resonant and ultimately chilling snapshot of the human condition in literary history. As a piece of writing, it spans the semantic gulf between prose and poetry and ultimately confounds our understanding of both. It takes words and uses them as daubs of color with which to paint a Sistine Chapel - a work of art that literally forces us to look up, beyond the restrictive gravity of our own humanity, and gaze directly into the divine, with only motes of sparkling brilliance to obscure the view.

I gasped the first time I read this foreword and in that seemingly endless pause for breath, I realized that oxygen was a pitiful replacement for the atmopshere of wonder within those all-too brief paragraphs. These heights, they dizzy us.

Read this, or choke on the wan, thin air of...Read more

This is a nearly complete listing of everything found in the Halo Universe - of that I was very happily surprised. There are a few timelines that are completely astounding with the level of detail they go in, as well as the linearity that they follow in the often-confusing details and stories littered throughout the creatively crafted Universe. This is a great, interesting read for any Sci-Fi junkie and any level Halo fan.

Don't go too far into that though - I am [admittedly] a giant Halo nerd who has the fan website, on forums, and constantly debates with friends regarding minute details and dark corners of the franchise. This book, however, does not go into the level of detail I was hoping for in a lot of categories. It has pretty visuals, some new concept art, but it just sometimes slaps a few text blocks of commonly-known facts about something without creative insight. Some of the entries (the engineers for one) almost word for word copied and pasted from the...Read more