Besides being a popular video game series, there are also many books about Halo, each of which I will review. I just realized, while looking up the Fall of Reach, that two new Halo books have been released, which I will have to get around to reading.
The Fall of Reach (by Eric Nylund, thought I’d put his name out there) tells the story of how the Master Chief and hundreds of other Spartans were developed. The story starts out before the Covenant have even been encountered, and the Spartans were actually trained to take out space pirates. Once the Covenant show up, the human race finds a better use for their breed of super soldiers.
In the Halo Universe, humans have migrated to hundreds of other planets. Reach is a world with the primary purpose of building intergalactic spaceships, and is one of the most heavily defended human planets in the Universe. Based on the title, the reader can conjecture what happens when the Covenant attack it.
Fall of Reach is a great origin story of the Spartans, and it leaves off right before the beginning of the first Halo video game. The subsequent novel, Halo: The Flood, is a novel version of Halo: Combat Evolved.
