Karen Traviss
Karen Traviss is an author.
Tie-in fiction is usually treated as a lesser form. Karen Traviss does not write it that way. Working from Wiltshire, she has produced novels inside Star Wars, Gears of War, Halo and G.I. Joe, alongside her own Wess'Har sequence and, more recently, the Nomad books with Nick Cole and Jason Anspach. She has also written comics and video game material, which is the same discipline under different constraints.
Her preoccupation across all of it is soldiers. What a chain of command does to the people inside it, what happens to a unit when the war it was raised for ends, and how a civilian population regards the men and women it asked to fight. She writes military characters who talk like military characters, and she gives the enemy side a case worth hearing. Her Mandalorians came with a language and a labour economy rather than a set of helmets.
The Wess'Har novels are the ones written entirely to her own brief, and they push harder: a first-contact sequence in which humans are not automatically the party in the right, with an environmental argument running underneath that gets genuinely uncomfortable.
Read her and the tie-in label stops being a warning and starts being a description of the constraints she happens to work inside.
Books (12)
- Star Wars - The Clone Wars (2008)
- Star Wars - Legacy of the Force - Sacrifice (2007)
- Star Wars - Boba Fett - A Practical Man (2006)
- The World Before (2005)
- Halo : Glasslands (2019)
- Halo: Mortal Dictata (2014)
- HALO: The Thursday War (2012)
- Gears of War - The Slab (2012)
- Gears of War: Coalition's End (2011)
- Gears of War - Anvil Gate (2010)
- Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant (2009)
- Gears of War - Aspho Fields (2008)
Where to start with Karen Traviss
The World Before is the honest starting point if you want the writer rather than the franchises, though it sits mid-sequence in the Wess'Har books and the earlier volumes are not among the credits listed here. It is where the environmental argument runs at full strength.
For the tie-ins, Gears of War - Aspho Fields is the best of them and the one to try first, because it does what the games never had room for: the war before the war, and what the survivors owe each other. Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant and Gears of War: Coalition's End carry it forward, and Gears of War - The Slab is the odd, bleak prison book that fans argue about.
In Star Wars, Star Wars - Boba Fett - A Practical Man is the compact introduction to her Mandalorian writing and Star Wars - Legacy of the Force - Sacrifice is the heavy one. Halo : Glasslands opens her Halo trilogy and is the most conventional work here.