The best Halo books that tell a story before Master Chief

The story of Halo, as told in the mainline video games, isn’t exactly the most interesting tale ever told. The larger world, however, is fascinating; there’s a religious cult of aliens, a few different wars, an infectious race that threatens to destroy the universe, and a set of rings designed to destroy it all first. Games tend to focus on where main characters stand or what they must shoot.

Thankfully, Halo’s ancillary material — like books, comics, short stories, and data logs — helps fill out the background of the universe and explores the millions of years worth of history that lurks beyond Master Chief’s intergalactic travels.

For those who don’t have dozens and dozens of hours to spend (waste?) reading the books — which mostly have names like Cryptum Halo — here’s an abridged version of what they contain. In other words, here’s all the cool stuff the games mostly don’t tell you about.

Everything is created by the creators

Halo’s history starts with the Precursors, a group of technologically advanced, Lovecraftian beings who ruled the galaxy millions of years before the events of the games. They created the Forerunners and the Covenant worshiping alien race, as well as ancient human beings (more about them later). The Precursors believed in an idea called the Mantle of Responsibility, which they felt gave them responsibility to protect all life in the galaxy — in part because they created most of it. As the Precursors’ civilization grew older, they planned to pass the Mantle on to humans. The Forerunners decided that the Mantle belonged to them and began to attempt to eliminate the Precursors to gain control over the galaxy.

At this point, the Precursor civilization was in serious decline. They also began losing battle against the Forerunners, despite being technologically superior. As the once-great civilization’s last hopes of winning the war grew dim, the Precursors became desperate to both wipe out the Forerunners and help themselves live forever.

Image: Bungie/343 Industries/Microsoft Games Studio

They created the Flood in an accident (sort of), out of desperation to accomplish both ends. The Flood is a deadly parasite that aims to infect any intelligent life. Some Precursors could change their form over many millions of years. They had taken on the shape of small dust particles and planned to regenerate later. These particles eventually became corrupted over many thousands of years and transformed into the Flood’s earliest forms.

Their civilization had been destroyed, so the Precursors lost all meaning and became obsessed with it. They taught the Flood to disregard humans and hunt for Forerunners. The utter destruction and ruin of the Forerunners became the remaining Precursors’ only mission in life, and technically, they succeeded.

By the Halo game’s time, the Flood was the last legacy left by the race. In fact, Gravemind claims to be a Precursor but is actually the transferred consciousness of a Precursor called Primordial who helped to carefully orchestrate the fall of the Forerunners by convincing the race’s own AI to turn against them.

After the rule of the Precursors, the Forerunners took up the Mantle of Responsibility and became the watchers of the galaxy’s sentient life. But they weren’t the only advanced species that lived there.

Humanity’s golden age

Halo’s prehistoric humans were brilliant and technologically advanced ancestors of the humans that exist in the game. They were capable of galactic travel and colonization, and for large portions of their history, they were close allies with the San’Shyuum — known later as the Prophets.

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

Image: 343 Industries/Microsoft Games Studio via Halopedia

The humans and the San’Shyuum threw their collective might at the Flood, only for the infectious race to continue to spread across their various planets. Humanity took control of several Forerunner planets in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. Eventually, the Flood simply stopped fighting and infecting humans — because of the Precursors’ actions described earlier in this story — and humanity survived their encounter.

And that’s when the Forerunners stepped in.

The war between human and Forerunners

The Forerunners’ time as protectors of the galaxy was mostly marked by a series of tremendously incompetent decisions, including the way it dealt with humanity. In an effort to stop the Flood from happening, humans attacked a handful of Forerunner planets. The Forerunners responded by dramatically overreacting. It was assumed that humans were moving toward war so they decided it must stop. It’s possible that one reason for the Forerunners’ overreaction here was because they resented the fact that humanity was the favored race of the Precursors and simply wanted them out of the way, but since Halo likes to keep at least a few mysteries around the Forerunners, we don’t know for sure.

More like an end of the world, the Forerunner-human conflict was more similar to an annihilation. Despite the fact that the humans had technology that rivaled, and in some cases even surpassed, the Forerunners’ tech, the human race had already been pushed to the brink of extinction by the Flood. Humanity, mostly fighting alone after the San’Shyuum surrendered early in the war, eventually got pushed back to their home world of Charum Hakkor. They were defeated after an extensive siege which lasted for many decades.

Image: 343 Industries/Microsoft Game Studios

Because the Forerunners refused to listen to humanity’s reason for taking the planets in the first place, or anything about humanity’s conflict with the Flood, they determined that humans were too dangerous to be permitted to continue to evolve. The Mantle of Responsibility was given to the Forerunners to ensure the safety of all the planets. They returned humanity to Tier 7 technology. Technology is ranked by the Forerunners according to tiers. Tier 7, which describes Stone Age technology, is lower than Tier 0 and is what the Precursors reached.

Humanity destroyed the Flood records as a bitter revenge for the Forerunners, who had wrongly decimated their civilisation.

The Forerunners were able to enjoy a prolonged period of peace after their war with humans. Actually, it was peaceful in the galaxy that the Forerunners de-weaponized. This was a terrible mistake, as the Flood is still present.

Forerunner-Flood war

The Flood was initially discovered by the Forerunners. They assumed that it was an inintelligible disease and not a sentient race bent on eating all life. They treated the Flood as a medical problem that was easily solved with quarantine and short-term treatments. The search for a cure continued. This was the same approach for nearly a century, as the Flood took control of more and more parts of the galaxy. By the time the Forerunners realized the truth, they were already late to a war that started a century ago, and they didn’t even have weapons to fight it.

Despite making some progress in weapon development and containment, the Forerunners really only managed to slow rather than stop the Flood’s progress through the galaxy. The Forerunners finally realized they needed to come up with a bigger, more apocalyptic solution. While there were major disagreements within the Forerunners’ ranks about the decision, they eventually decided to create the Halo array in order to destroy every living thing in the galaxy, with only The Ark acting as a life-saving vessel.

Image: Bungie via Halopedia

Flood-related galaxy takeovers got more severe, and the Forerunner, also known as Didact, became the antagonist. Halo 4The Halo array was fired by ), which worked… mostly. The Halo array destroyed nearly all sentient life within the galaxy and only a handful of Forerunners survived to The Ark.

In order to revive the galaxy of life with humans, including Covenant members, the Forerunners had left behind AIs, such as the Sentinels, and automated systems like the Sentinels.

Read More

At the moment Halo is home to around 30 books, with the latest one being released October 2021. Most of these books aren’t about the history of the galaxy and the Forerunners, but a few are. If you’re interested in learning more about what happened in Halo’s universe before the games, here are a few books worth reading.

Saga about the Forerunners

Greg Bear’s trilogy of books is the most important place to start for any of Halo’s ancient history. This series of books covers the Forerunners and ancient humans, and it’s where almost all our information on those two civilizations, and the Precursors, comes from. These books are entertaining, but only if you’re really, really deep into the Halo nonsense, because they’re proper-noun soup and all the characters have names like Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting. I enjoyed the books very much.

Cryptum Halo

Halo: Primordium

Silentium: Halo

Halo 4’s Terminals

These aren’t really books, but the Halo 4The Terminals provide a few details about key characters from the Forerunner Saga. They also don’t mean much without the books to back them up.

Halo Mythos

Halo MythosThis is an enormous guidebook for the Halo universe. It also includes a timeline that shows the whole story, at least until 2016. Only the first section is about the series’ ancient history, but it’s interesting and useful nonetheless.