So, this book has been around for a few days and I was not disappointed by the contents. Several big question got answered for me and I would like to share what I picked up on.
[spoiler]It would appear that most, if not all, Forerunners did not escape the firing of the Halo arrays. We never get a direct confirmation but the characters believed that the Greater Ark was overwhelmed and destroyed.
Precursors did indeed create humans, Forerunners, and Flood. Or at least the last remaining one did. The creature that we previously thought to be the Primordial was simply a puppet. Precursor artifacts activated all over the galaxy at the endgame to assist the Flood.
The Forerunners, millions of years prior, built massive extragalactic fleets to eradicate the precursors. We don't get any info on how the engagements played out other than the Precursors seemed to be unable to defend themselves adequately and were dumbfounded that their creations were fighting them.
343 Guilty Spark IS Chakas. Not a fragment of, but is.
Master Chief is all but confirmed to have a dormant Iso-Didact geas. This has been around since Halo CE. In CE, 343 asks chief: "Last time, you asked me, if it were my choice, would I do it? Having had considerable time to ponder your query, my answer has not changed." Now, at the end of Silentium, page 314 Iso-Didact asks; "Tell me, Chakas, if this as your choice, after all we have seen and survived... would you fire the rings?" In Halo CE, Chakas clearly recognizes the Chief as Iso-Didact. I'm willing to bet a whole plate of internet cookies that the voice Chief was hearing in his head in Halo 4 was his reawakened geas.
And now I will go on to what intrigued me the most out of the entire book. On page 329 we have this passage:
[i]There is one last patch of communication, somewhere below, within a great dense cloud-perhaps a star nursery. A new and precocious civilization acquiring its voice only now, having eluded both the Foerunner and the Flood... sending its first plaintive, hopeful signals.
Crying out for attention.[/i] Heed us!
Now what on God's green Earth just happened on the second-to-last page of this trilogy? Clearly this species is important, if it was worth mentioning during such a pivotal moment in the entire series. I have another plate of internet cookies that I'm willing to bet that the mystery ship in the Halo CEA terminal comes from this civilization. One of my theories includes that since we know nothing about them and that they were undetectable by Forerunner and, more importantly, Flood, maybe they had a cure for the Flood or a way to combat them? What were they trying to desperately say before the Halo array was fired? I feel that it will tie together with the Librarian discovering that the Domain is the Organon. I also feel that the Librarian was somehow able to preserve the knowledge that the Domain retained and that is what the Absolute Record will be.
[/spoiler]
If you read through all of that, thank you. I am excited to hear feedback from fellow Haloverse fans and their thoughts and interpretations of the new information this book provides.
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Edited by Haruspis: 3/24/2013 7:17:49 PMYou know what really pisses me off? The Forerunner Saga will forever be passed off as a video game tie-in series, Silentium in-particular will not receive the [b]world-class[/b] praise it deserves as standing with the works of some of the other greats of science fiction literature, it will never have its quality truly recognised because of the prejudice today’s society has against video games and the [insert derogatory word here] members of the Halo community who just want to see action and huge battles. The Forerunner Saga has had those moments, especially in Cryptum and Silentium - for example, the battle of the Capitol being one of the largest battles in the Halo series, and then the battle of the Greater Ark where Faber redeems himself by going down with his own creations and helping the IsoDidact escape the Flood. But the Forerunner Saga is primarily about world and character building, illustrating 10 million years of history through the various perceptions of characters - humans, Forerunners and AIs. It's absolutely masterful, yes Primordium suffered from having too little going on in the first half of the novel, but anyone who doesn't recognise the Forerunner Saga for what it is (hard sci-fi at its very best) is a fool. Silentium is proper Lovecraftian cosmic horror filled with tragedy of epic proportions, especially for characters like the Ur-Didact who is tortured into [i]complete[/i] insanity by the Gravemind as we learn about this race of transsentient beings who predate the known universe itself. It captures a sense of scale that [i]none[/i] of the other novels from Nylund, Buckell, Traviss (etc) could ever even come close to matching.