The best Halo books that tell a story before the Master Chief

The story of Halo as told in the mainline video games isn’t exactly the most interesting story ever told. The bigger world, however, is fascinating; There’s a religious cult of aliens, a couple of different wars, an infectious race threatened to destroy the universe, and a series of rings designed to destroy everything first. The games tend to stick to the here and now of where the main characters are or who to shoot.

Fortunately, Halo’s resource materials – such as books, comics, short stories, and data logs – help fill in the backdrop of the universe and explore the millions of years of history that lurk beyond the Master Chief’s intergalactic journeys.

For those who don’t have dozens of hours to read (waste?) The books – most of them have names like Halo: crypt – here is an abridged version of what they contain. In other words, here are all the cool things that the games mostly don’t tell you about.

The creators of everything

Halo’s story begins with the Precursors, a group of technologically advanced Lovecraft beings who ruled the galaxy millions of years before the events of the Games. The Forerunners created both the Forerunners, the race of aliens that the Alliance worships, and the ancient humans (more on that later). The forerunners believed in an idea called the Mantle of Responsibility, which they believed had to protect all life in the galaxy – in part because they created most of it. As the precursor civilization got older, they planned to pass the cloak on to the people. However, the precursors believed that the mantle should be theirs, so they began an attempt to exterminate the precursors in order to take control of the galaxy.

At this point, the society of the forerunners was already in decline and, despite its technological lead, was beginning to lose the battle against the forerunners. As the once great civilization’s final hopes of winning the war waned, the Forerunners desperately tried both to wipe out the Forerunners and to help themselves live forever.

Image: Bungie / 343 Industries / Microsoft Games Studio

Desperate to achieve both ends, the Forerunners happened to (somehow) create the Flood, a dangerous parasite that seeks to infect all intelligent life. Because the precursors were able to change shape over millions of years, some had taken the form of tiny dust particles that were supposed to regenerate in the future. However, over the course of thousands of years, these particles became corrupted and eventually turned into the earliest forms of the flood.

After her civilization was essentially gone, the last remaining forerunners became possessed by the flood and began teaching it to ignore humans as if they had natural immunity and hunt forerunners instead. The total destruction and ruin of the Forerunners became the only mission in life of the remaining Forerunners, and technically they were successful.

The tide is the only remaining legacy of the race at the time of the Halo Games. In fact, Gravemind claims to be a forerunner but is actually the transmitted consciousness of a forerunner named Primordial who helped carefully orchestrate the case of the forerunners by convincing the breed’s own AI to turn against them.

After the rulership of the Forerunners, the Forerunners took on the cloak of responsibility and became the guardians of the sentient life of the galaxy. But they weren’t the only advanced species living there.

The golden age of mankind

Halos prehistoric humans were brilliant and technologically advanced ancestors of the humans who existed in the game. Capable of galactic travel and colonization, they were close allies of the San’Shyuum – later known as prophets – for much of their history.

Eventually, humanity’s journey through the stars led to the Flood, and war broke out almost immediately.

Image: 343 Industries / Microsoft Games Studio above Halopedia

The humans and the San’Shyuum threw their collective power on the flood only to allow the contagious race to spread further across their various planets. Desperate to forestall the infection, humanity took over several worlds of the forerunners. Eventually the flood simply stopped fighting and infecting humans – due to the actions of the forerunners described earlier in this story – and humanity survived their encounter.

And that’s when the Forerunners stepped in.

The human-precursor war

The forerunners’ time as protectors of the galaxy was largely shaped by a series of enormously incompetent decisions, including how to deal with humanity. After humans invaded a few precursor planets to stop the tide, the precursors reacted dramatically. They assumed that humanity was pushing for war and decided that humans must be stopped. It’s possible that one reason the Forerunners overreacted here was because they resented the fact that humanity was the preferred race of the Forerunners and just wanted to get them out of the way, but since Halo loves it, at least a few secrets to keep the precursors, we don’t know for sure.

The war between the forerunners and humans was more of an annihilation. Despite the fact that humans possessed technology that rivaled, and in some cases surpassed, technology of its predecessors, humanity had already been pushed to the brink of extinction by the flood. Humanity, who mostly fought alone after the San’Shyuum surrendered at the beginning of the war, was eventually pushed back to their homeworld, Charum Hakkor. After decades of siege, the people were finally defeated.

Image: 343 Industries / Microsoft Game Studios

Refusing to hear humanity’s reasons for conquering the planets or anything about humanity’s conflict with the Flood, the Forerunners found that humans were too dangerous to be allowed to evolve. To protect the rest of the galaxy under the mantle of responsibility, the Forerunners brought humanity back to what is known as Tier 7 technology. The Forerunners have a complicated rank-based ranking system for technology; Tier 7 is the lowest, describing Stone Age technology, and Tier 0 is the highest that only the forerunners have ever achieved.

As the final act of bitter vengeance on the forerunners who wrongly wiped out their civilization, humanity destroyed all of their records of the Flood just before they were undone.

After their conflict with humans, the only race in the galaxy that could reasonably oppose them, the forerunners enjoyed a long period of peace. In fact, things were so peaceful in the galaxy that the Forerunners actually completely disarmed the weapons. Which turned out to be a bad mistake as the tide was still there.

Precursory flood war

When the Forerunners first discovered the Flood, they assumed it was an unintelligent disease, and not a sentient race out to consume all living things. Based on this assumption, they initially treated it as a medical problem that could be resolved through quarantine, short-term treatment, and finding a cure. This approach lasted for over a hundred years as the tide slowly conquered more and more parts of the galaxy. By the time the forerunners realized the truth, they were already too late for a war that began a century ago and they didn’t even have weapons to fight it.

Despite some advances in weapon development and containment, the Forerunners really only managed to slow, rather than stop, the progress of the tide through the galaxy. Eventually, the forerunners realized they needed to find a bigger, more apocalyptic solution. While there was great disagreement among the ranks of the Forerunners over the decision, they eventually decided to create the Halo Array to destroy every living being in the galaxy, with only the Ark acting as a life-saving ship.

Image: Bungie via Halopedia

As the flood’s takeover of the galaxy got worse, the forerunner known as Didact (which is both the antagonist of and is not), Halo 4) fired the halo array, which … mostly worked. It wiped out almost all sentient life in the galaxy, and few precursors survived on the ark.

The forerunners left behind machines like the Sentinels and AIs like 343 Guilty Spark to bring the galaxy back to life, including humans and members of the Alliance, which led to the events of the first Halo game.

Reading list

Halo has somewhere around At the moment 30 books have been published, with the latest being released in October 2021. Most of these books are not about the history of the galaxy and its predecessors, but some are. If you want to learn more about what happened in Halo’s universe before the games, here are a few books you should read.

The forerunner saga

Greg Bear’s book trilogy is the main starting point for the ancient story of Halos. This series of books is about the forerunners and the ancient people, and it is from there that almost all of our information about these two civilizations and the forerunners comes. These books are entertaining, but only if you dive really deep into the Halo nonsense, because they’re proper name soup and all of the characters have names like Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting. (I enjoyed it very much.)

Halo: crypt

Halo: primordium

Halo: silence

Halo 4‘s terminals

These aren’t really books, but they are Halo 4 Terminals give you some information about some of the main characters in the Forerunner saga. They don’t mean much either without the books that support them.

Halo myth

Halo myth is a huge travel guide through the Halo universe and offers a timeline of all history (at least until 2016). Only the first section deals with the series’ ancient history, but it is interesting and useful nonetheless.