Skye Nathaniel

In some areas, this exceeded my expectations for a videogame tie-in novel, but for the most part it's just fine. Its biggest strength is probably in how it manages to make the Covenant a far more dire threat than I remember them seeming in the games (I only played Halo and Halo 2, and that was over 20 years ago). Throughout The Fall of Reach, humanity is struggling to survive a losing war against a ruthless and technologically superior enemy that has shown no interest in learning about or communicating with us. This Covenant has remained alien and unknowable even after decades of fighting, and it is clear that they intend to wipe humanity out completely despite being unprovoked. The book does a good job of selling this threat as truly existential; by the end, it's estimated that humans could be eradicated within months or even weeks, and you believe it because you've seen how outmatched the UNSC forces are.

I particularly enjoyed certain chapters that detailed the space combat tactics of Keyes's battles, Cortana's approach to hacking, and the workings of the Mjolnir armor. Nylund is exciting when he gets technical. I liked some of the military stuff: debriefings and promotions, the culture of respect and decorum, under-utilized officers having their potential recognized and being reassigned, communications with skeptical superiors that convince them of new and surprising intelligence which causes them to redirect units, etc.

But a lot of the more boots-on-the-ground action was less interesting to me (gameplay is better experienced than described), and obviously John isn't much of a character. In many ways I sensed that the intellectual property was holding the novel back. There's a lot of repetitious imagery concerning stars warping as ships emerge from slipspace and lights gathering along Covenant hulls as their weapons charge and metal boiling away when the plasma impacts a target, and that's because the limited elements of this universe were predetermined by what appeared in the original game. I'm planning to play the games and read (some of?) the books where they fit as I go, and I'm hoping that they open up more as the series develops; otherwise, I may need to pare down my reading list. I enjoyed this well enough, but I don't want to read a dozen more like it.

The story of a youthful but powerful agent of chaos caught between her trauma and the friendship of her well-intentioned but scorned villainous boss whose compassion she is ill-equipped to accept, Nimona's breezily explosive early adventures belie the comic's ambition. Its characters are never quite who you expect them to be, and it grows darker and thicker with each chapter as the stakes rise and its silly background blend of medieval knighthood and mad science tropes somehow mutates into solid worldbuilding.

I don't know how something that seems like it was conceived as a work of genre parody ended up becoming so original, but Nimona really works—and it's surprisingly affecting in the end. There's a clear throughline from here to the author's popular Princesses of Power series, which spends a lot of its runtime examining the heavily guarded vulnerability of a similarly destructive, closed-off character. I am far, far older than the intended audience for this stuff, but it really hits for me. Nimona is easy to recommend, and I'm looking forward to checking out its film adaptation.