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September 22, 2003

Humans are this, Humans are that. I know you are but what am I. I'm rubber you're glue...

Wintermute manages to collect a lot of classic speculation in a well written, easily consumable post, and while he's at it, highlight another literary reference mentioned as important to Halo's development. Snipped from his post :

Wintermute (durandal217@yahoo.com) writes:

Jason also said that the Mote series (by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, Niven also wrote Ringworld) played a big part in influencing the storyline of Halo.

At first I thought that meant that's where he got the Covenant idea from, from the Mote series, because the Moties (the first Alien race that Humans meet) have a caste system, much like the Covenant.

This could be convincingly argued, but more interesting is that (this is what I think I've figured out) he also seems to have set a certain structure of technological advancement on the human race that comes directly from the Mote series as well.

Most people think, or at least have a sneaking suspicion that the humans are the Forerunner.

In the Mote series, the Moties are an alien civilization that has these cycles where they advance to a certain point technologically and then destroy themselves in war. They keep blasting themselves back into the Stone Age.

So in one of these cycles, some alien gets the bright idea to make a kind of fortress/museum of their higher technology so that it will survive the next big war and then the survivors of the war and their offspring don't have to take as long to rebuild their society because once they figure out how to get into the "museum", their growth as a race with accelerate by leaps and bounds.

So this happened to the Forerunner 900,000 years ago...

Maybe not in the same Cycle System, but maybe in a war against the Flood or something. Either way, I'm betting they were wiped out and somehow the seed of Human civilization on Earth was in effect the next generation of the Forerunner race.

So finally, the MC lands on Halo, walks into the Control Room, 343GS thinks he's "coming back" (figuratively OR literally) to reclaim the higher technology of Halo, or just Halo itself.

Hence the name Reclaimer.

Visit Winternutes full post on the subject to read further or add your own thoughts.

900 000 years ago, eh? Is that in Earth Standard or the magically ambiguous "local year" :P

permalink | Rampant Speculation

-Finn




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