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Starhammer (September 1987)
The Vang: The Military Form (February 1988)
The Vang: The Battlemaster (September 1990)
The three books in this series formed a “significant” source of “inspiration” for Bungie Software and Halo.
By significant, I mean they basically ripped off almost all of it.
They got away with it because the Vang series has never been very well known and is rare. You have to pay above normal prices to get copies nowadays, the books having been out of print for the last twenty years, with only a small printing run in the first place.
Back to the books themselves. They take place from 4533 A.D. to 7533 A.D, with the intervals between each book on the order of a thousand years or more.
This means that each book has a new set of main characters. This works out pretty well in that each character has an EPIC ADVENTURE [TM] and that's it; rather than:
The eponymous villian of the series are the Vang Oormlikoowl -- a name that comes from the Batrachian, a race of aliens which lived a billion years ago."Help us Luke Skywalker and Han Solo! The New Republic is once again under horrible existential threat from a dangerous new alien race which suddenly showed up from nowhere! Even though you are in your 60s, everything must revolve around your heroic efforts to save the galaxy!"
Essentially put, Vang Oormlikoowl translates as roughly: High Intelligence Omniparasitic Lifeform. Essentially, the Vang see all other life as either food to be eaten or hosts to be parasitized.
Basically an organic Borg. Of course if this sounds like the Flood; that's because like I said earlier, Bungie stole almost everything from the Vang/Starhammer universe for "inspiration".
Rowley also details his universe very well; referring to events that occurred long ago to set the backstory.
To give you an example -- in Starhammer, there's these passages:
"...There are some fascinating cults. Like the Pansperm Sympathoea, an extreme male-supremacist group who have been7 homosexual with reproductive cloning for forty generations or more. They are said to be radically altered from the human norm in patterns of thought. Their visual arts, for example, have progressed into new, quite bizarre experimentation in the religiosity of sexual depiction."
That's all you ever see of these two specific cults in the Vang/Starhammer universe. But in those simple paragraphs; Rowley creates a backstory that works very well."...origins date back to the early era of competing nations in space. Several small nations fled to space quite early on. They brought strange, violent creeds with them, like the much-abominated Saudi male cultists."
"Oh, Clawenton! Must we bring such things up? That's just disgusting! Compulsory female circumcision, purdah, and harems! Why, they almost bred themselves into two distinct species, male and female."
Likewise; even though it's around 4500 A.D. the universe that humanity inhabits is very much recognizable by us.
Again, a passage in Starhammer refers to how things are on the mega-habitats -- giant self contained space stations in the Nocanicus system, which has no habitable planets -- just gas giants and either rock or ice ball worlds which supply raw materials like water and oxygen to the habs:
When you think about it; it makes sense.The crowds on the ramps and on the prime level were heavy. It was a bluecard hour, the card cops were out in force. All bearers of red and green cards had to stay out of the octagon until the hour changed. Since it was just a few days before the Seasonal Festival that would inaugurate the annual thirty-one days of Winter Month, everyone was out shopping for something to wear to the huge corporate parties and the Masque balls that would pound on for days during the ThanksaKrismas weekend.
That's when the habitat mirrors would be tilted to the "winter position," which allowed a fraction less light. The interior would cool about fifteen to twenty degrees and a carefully orchestrated recreation of a terrestrial winter would take place. Right down to the annual snowfall, for an hour or two.
Two thousand years into the future where pretty much everything has been super-commoditized to the point where a $49.99 (equivalent) entertainment center can generate images indistinguishable from reality...what's left but social status?
Some thumbnail reviews of each book:
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“Starhammer” is more of a detective noir story set in a typical space opera. The first few chapters introduce the backstory of the main character, who gets hired by the Laowon; an alien race which has held humanity in a sort of puppet “Imperial China” status for the last 1,500 years; ever since a disastrous first contact gone bad.
From there on, the story becomes more and more space operatic, with more shooting and killing until the finale which introduces combat operations on a small scale. Basically; this is the book that sets up the universe, and does it very well, making it's lack of large scale military operations until the end okay.
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“The Military Form” is set about a thousand years after Starhammer. It takes place within a solar system that has a sole inhabited human world which is still very much unsettled. The best way to describe Saskatch is that it's a mix between Alaska and Canada. The first third or so of the book sets up the various factions on Saskatch itself and basic background on the planet.
Naturally, a surviving Vang form is found in the solar system and things get worse and worse from that point for our characters. The combat action in this book is on the scale of urban combat between irregular forces.
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“The Battlemaster” is set about two thousand years after the events depicted in The Military Form. Its set on a backwater planet called Wexel that has never quite recovered from the events sparked off in Starhammer, some three thousand years ago. As before, the first third or so of the book details the basics of the planet and once again a Vang form is found.
Unlike the last Vang incursion two millennia ago; humanity is much better prepared this time around, with formal directives and laws concerning what to do if a Vang Form is found. The action in this book is the heaviest and most military science fictiony of all three books, since a major character in the book is a ITAA Ground Forces Colonel sent to clean up the massive corruption on Wexel and instead finds herself facing a Directive 115 situation.
