: From the feedback from external collaborators
: we've heard (admittedly, maybe just good PR) 343i has had a much better
: track record of handling people. I know Greg Bear and a few of the other
: authors had great things to say about them, especially in contrast with
: LucasFilm, which has to be saying something.

I actually talked to Greg Bear at Worldcon.

You know that Amazon.com is a publisher now? They've got an imprint called "North 47", and they held a party at the Davenport Hotel to promote it. Now I'm glad that a friend told me about the party because I otherwise wouldn't have heard of it, but at the time I was irritated because I was sure that it would be the sort of party that I'd never find, and I was mostly drawn by the promise of free food.

Well, lo and behold, I finally found it. There was free food. There was one free drink per patron. There was a table full of free books signed by their authors, who were standing behind the table. Oh, and standing off to one side was Greg Bear.

So there I am. Plate of food and two books in one hand, drink (Pepsi and vodka) and a bag of goodies in the other, desperately trying to get organized before something spills. Greg Bear walked up, pointed to the copy of the Mongoliad in my hands (signed by five out of seven authors) and said "I better not catch you selling that on E-bay."

He was amazing. I've heard people say that he's friendly, but he will talk to you like you're his next-door neighbor. What I told him was, I told him that ancient mysterious precursor races are common as dirt in science fiction, and when a writer finally pulls off the veil and explores them in depth, the result is inevitably disappointing. But his Forerunner didn't disappoint. They lived up to the hype.

Well, that got him talking about the journey to writing the Forerunner Trilogy. I'd heard a rumor that he was originally tapped to write for Evolutions, but his story outline ran too long and 343i turned it into the Forerunner Trilogy. According to Greg Bear, that's not true. 343i knew that they were going to feature the Forerunner in the new games and they needed someone to write a book about them. He'd just published "City at the End of Time", and that caught their interest.

343i was easy to work with, very helpful and very accommodating. He was discussing the outline for Cryptum with the writing team, and he said that the book needed a human character for audiences to latch on to. The immediate reply was "I know who that could be!" And that's how Chakas came to be 343 Guilty Spark.

It wasn't all smooth sailing. Primordium needed a rewrite because it had diverged too far from several plot points in Halo 4. No hard feelings on Greg Bear's part. As he said, it's easier to rewrite a book than a 20 million dollar video game. I agree, but... I can't help but feel that a Halo 4 that cleaved closer to Bear's vision would have been so much better.

I don't know. I just had to get that awesome story off my chest.