Unlike most of the stories inspired by the Halo video games, understanding Kelly Gay’s novella Halo: Smoke And Shadow doesn’t require you to have played Halo 5: Guardians et al. to completion. Now Gay is continuing where her novella left off with the novel Halo: Renegades (paperback, Kindle). In the following email interview, Gay discusses what inspired this story and how it connects to the Halo cannon (and not just the games, either).
In 2017, science fiction writer Nancy Kress decided her novella Yesterday’s Kin needed to be expanded into trilogy of novels Tomorrow’s Kin, If Tomorrow Comes, and the upcoming Terran Tomorrow. But while fellow sci-fi writer Kelly Gay took a similar path with her novella Halo Smoke And Shadow, which started life as the short story “Into The Fire,” she says that this tale inspired by the Halo video games — which is now available in paperback after more than a year of being digital only — was originally conceived as the longer version.