Poor, awkward sentence structure. Misuse and mismatch of tenses at times. Stilted, painful dialog. ******-poor character development (mainly for the non-Master Chief characters). Lack of flow. Forgot to "omit needless words". And so on (I don't have my copy anymore, so I can't point out specific examples). Basically, it made me want to beat him over the head with a copy of Strunk&White for an hour, and then follow it up with Stephen King's On Writing for another hour. There have only been a couple of books that I've read that were as badly written as that one, though The Flood was the only one I actually forced my way through to the end, because I am that interested in the Halo universe.Eterna1Soldier wrote...]
As for your "atrocious writing" - please explain. Do you mean poor sentence structure? Limited vocabulary use? Because I read a lot. I know bad writing when I see it. That wasn't the problem with Flood. It was the constant combat. There was so much writing about MC in firefights that eventually it got boring. But again, the author was limited.
Again, it was not the content of Halo: The Flood that bothered me at all. In fact, I was looking forward to seeing more about what others aside from the Master Chief were doing. It was the poor presentation of that content.
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Also, I'm not sure what you mean by this:
I don't see how one excuses the other. Being heavy on combat is about content, not writing style. It is perfectly possible to write good action and combat scenes. Read any of the battles in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or the combat in Halo: Contact Harvest, for a more closely related, less "literature" example. Or, really, any of the other Halo books. Even the one with the worst writing, The Fall of Reach (which was Nylund's first Halo book and most weakly written, lacking the flow and... maturity, I guess, of writing style he developed over the later books), was above and beyond The Flood.No, the Flood was not "atrocious writing". It was simply too heavy on combat.
It's not that the book had too much combat. I like fictional combat. It's that the combat was poorly written.
In my (perhaps not so) humble opinion.
Modifié par Interactive Civilian, 19 février 2011 - 03:42 .
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Drew. 
