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My recollection is that most of the Halo novels are what Warhammer fans refer to as 'bolter porn'. I remember liking The Fall of Reach, which was a perfectly adequate and entertaining page-turner, but then looking at The Flood, Contact Harvest, Ghosts of Onyx, and so on, the quality decreased quickly. Greg Bear's Forerunner trilogy is by reputation decent, but it also has pretty much nothing to do with Halo.
I think it would be fair to say that the Halo series is about gameplay, first and foremost, and its extended 'lore' is pretty forgettable. I know they try to do something interesting with the UNSC being evil, but as far as the games are concerned (or at least the original trilogy), "humans good, aliens bad" is all you need to know.
(The UNSC does have to be pretty sketchy if they were the kind of people who kidnapped children in order to make brainwashed surgically-enhanced super-soldiers to put down a colonial rebellion, even prior to contact with the Covenant. In the original game manual, it is not clear whether SPARTAN-IIs predate contact with the Covenant or not, and you can read them as being a desperation project in the face of repeated defeats at alien hands. But the novels put paid to that. I bring this up because the top-level post praises Halo's moral clarity and lack of ambiguity, but in terms of the EU, it didn't even make it through a single novel - technically released prior to the original game! - before telling us "actually the human government is evil too".)
There was a reason I called out Eric Nylund's novels specifically. He is to Halo fiction what Dan Abnett and Rob Rath are to 40K, they understand what makes the games and the setting appealing and they elevate it.
And yes the UNSC is shady and corrupt, but the important thing is that our heroes are not. "I am going to do the right thing, orders be damned" is a recurring motif in both the games and novels. and for my part at least, that is a major reason why I find certain choices made in the later games and media so problematic. Like I said, I don't want nihilism and moral ambiguity from my fiction. I get enough of that from studying history. What I want is something to inspire and/or aspire to.
Insofar as we're still talking culture war, I would argue that part of the experience of growing up in the 2000s in the West has been that of being disenchanted by institutions. The story of the past couple of decades is that of a Western population gradually learning that all the authoritative bodies of our society are at best fallible and at worst corrupted or depraved - state, church, media, academia, all seem to have left their missions behind. That's a fertile environment for stories about people created by or serving corrupt systems who nonetheless have to defy those systems to stand for what's right.
The untrustworthiness of the UNSC and especially ONI is part of that, but you see the same trend more widely. Captain America gets betrayed by America. Heroes must struggle against their own institutions. Not that rebellion was never valorised in the past, obviously, but I remember commenting that even in Star Wars, in the 70s/80s Rebel leadership was portrayed as consistently trustworthy and capable, which would be less likely now. Outside the realm of fiction, the impulse obviously runs through both left-populism and right-populism, through both Occupy and MAGA, and given free rein turns into conspiracy theories like QAnon. That omnipresent feeling that you cannot trust authorities or institutions is a feature of our day.
Halo is quite an early example, but this would be consistent with Nylund/Bungie establishing early on that no large-scale authorities are to be wholly trusted. Halo 2 goes even stronger on the idea with the Arbiter's story - it's as if they're saying that, even if you fight for the bad guys, if you behave in a consistently honourable, truth-seeking way, that will inevitably lead you into conflict with institutions.
Maybe it his is one of those cultural gaps but I feel like in order to become disenchanted one must have first been enchanted and that was just never my my experience. Where I'm from it was simply taken as a given that the authorities fallible fallible and more often than not corrupt. From Short Circuit to Aliens and Die Hard I grew up watching movies where "the government" or "the company" were the bad guys.
I feel like a big difference between you and I is that unlike you I grew up sincerely believing that if I behaved with honor and integrity I would inevitably come into conflict with the powers that be.
I don't know how much you know about me or even recognise my name, but I think in my case there's a bit more complexity to it than that?
On the one hand, I grew up as a high-achieving upper-middle class posh white boy, so if I think about all my schooling, it came with the implicit message that if I do well, conform, act politely, etc., I will be rewarded. Even religiously, as much as I had the resources to understand that friendship with the world is enmity with God, that we must not conform ourselves to the world, and so on, the emphasis of most of my education was that nonetheless sacred institutions are basically good and trustworthy. (Typically the way it went was that we, institutionally, are not conforming ourselves to the world, by being good activist left-wingers whereas 'the world' is all that nasty stupid stuff the Bush administration is doing.)
On the other hand, those religious resources did exist, and I can also think of plenty of stories, even very lowbrow ones, that I internalised and which were about the failure of authorities to recognise virtue. As Sturm Brightblade teaches us (I was a D&D and Dragonlance fan, alas), the good are not recognised in their own time, and even the order may lose its way. As I grew older I became more aware of the ways in which the wider humanist tradition recognises this fact. I've been fond, on the Motte, of Tanner Greer's essay - "the world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living".
I think there has always been a tension here, and as I have grown older, I have shifted more towards the failures of the world. The idea that you can behave well and be rewarded by the respect of others and worldly success seems increasingly farcical to me. Still, overall this is not so much an overturning of my younger self's worldview as, I hope, a refinement of it. There is no perfect authority to pledge myself to. The orders of the world can only, at best, imperfectly reflect the good, and even that is usually too much to ask. The challenge is to seek the good, and to do good, even knowing that the systems we inhabit are irremediably broken.
To stick with the culture war element, this struck me forcibly reading Rod Dreher on Orban's defeat. For all that Dreher was the man who preached the Benedict Option, who warned that secular power was an unworthy lure and that people should not put their faith in princes or in presidents, you can see that at his core he is a man who craves a righteous authority. Once it was the Catholic Church, then that failed him. More recently it's been Orban and conservative nationalism. Now that Orban's failed, he's coming apart again. He cannot reconcile himself to the idea that the authority is broken, that the authority will always be broken, and that the task of the individual is to stand for wholeness regardless.
In short, this:
is correct.
If you try to be the one straight thing in a bent world, you will always come into conflict with those who would bend you. The tides of worldly power flow and reverse and anybody who finds themselves always moving with the tide is either an opportunist or a coward. A life of principle always leads one into conflict with power.
First off, I don't know much about you but I do recognize your name.
...and funnily enough the Dragonlance Chronicles were very much a part my formative years. Specifically the Doom Brigade and the Time of the Twins trilogy. From my perspective the idea that "the world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living" ties in neatly with what I have said previously about how " the post-modern liberal ethos of emancipation, self actualization, and the maximization of one's earthly/material material conditions and status is simply incompatible with forming healthy relationships and families."
As for the the bit about how...
...on this much we are in complete agreement.
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