Art and entertainment

This page covers various pieces of art and entertainment, including books, music, games, films, series, and various pop culture miscellanea.

Fiction genres

 * Solar Opera — Solar Opera is a genre of historical fiction that dramatizes the early days of humanity's colonization of the Sol system from the early 21st century up to the advent of slipspace travel in the 23rd. Most Solar Opera stories emphasize the rough-and-tumble competition between various Earth nations, corporations and factions, but also highlight the efforts of the pioneers braving the final frontier. Although the genre is characterized by the idealization of the era, deconstructionist interpretations have also gained ground. Such works typically highlight the harsh realities of early space living, as well as the moral gray areas of the brutal conflicts of the era.
 * Frontier Romance — a historical genre dealing with humanity's interstellar colonization era, especially the 24th and early 25th centuries. Similar to Solar Opera, Frontier Romance themes are reminiscent of both classical Westerns and science fiction. While precursors to the genre existed during the settlement of the Inner Colonies, the genre only emerged in its fully-realized form during the Pax Humana era, and is characterized by healthy doses of nostalgia and idealism. Like Solar Opera, dark and subversive takes on the genre exist as well, and these started to become particularly common during the Insurrection.

Films and series
By the 26th century, long-running multimedia franchises are the norm. With ubiquitous streaming services, the line between films and TV series has become blurred, with most long-running shows simply being called "serials".


 * Age of Aquarius — a classic "spiritual science fiction" film serial drawing from 23rd-century New Age revivalism. Later noted for its prominent use of ring-shaped space habitats remarkably similar to the Halo rings.
 * Areomancer — an originally-Martian Solar Fantasy film and media franchise.
 * Callisto: Hunt for the Truth — a low-budget film noted for its use as an Insurrectionist propaganda device.
 * Forlorn Hope — a long-running, war-era series about the UNSC Navy successfully capturing a Covenant 'Star Cruiser'. In the third and fourth seasons, the Forlorn Hope set out to establish contact with other alien races to form an alliance against the Covenant. The ship was rebuffed again and again, as alien civilizations were either indifferent, afraid, or too busy with their own struggles to help Humanity.
 * Genesis: Space — an early-25th century film and game franchise featuring a hopeful and idealistic future vision of humanity living in harmony in a galactic community compose of various alien species.
 * Hard Vacuum — a historical drama centered on the Interplanetary Wars.
 * Into the Howling Dark — a docu-drama miniseries focusing on the Human-Covenant War's final mission at the Ark, featuring a famous interview with the then-retired Lord Hood.
 * The Light Barrier — a popular dramatization of the events that led up to the creation of the Shaw-Fujikawa translight drive, noted for its focus on the interpersonal dynamic between doctors Tobias Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa.
 * Red Shift — a 24th-century hard science fiction film depicting the culture shock experienced by the crew of a relativistic interstellar spacecraft sent to colonize a world in the Tau Ceti system, only for them to discover it had already been settled centuries earlier by slipspace-capable starfarers. An example of alternate history, the premise was based on real colony ship plans involving the Martian moon Deimos, which never materialized before the invention of the slipspace drive.
 * Solipsis — an award-winning film famous for its exploration of the "smart" AI psyche, notable as the first film to feature an actual smart AI in an acting role.
 * Space Pioneers — a science-fiction film series created in the first half of the 24th century and one of the most noted early works to incorporate the then-recently-discovered out-of-place biota phenomenon. Notably, Space Pioneers features the main cast, composed of a crew of "slippers", coming across several "lost colonies" of humans and other hominids, who have developed divergent civilizations on alien worlds.
 * Spartan Strike — a post-war young adult series noted for its colorful depictions of Spartans, a continuity of propagandistic war-era portrayals of the supersoldiers in media.
 * Star Maker — a cerebral science fiction film and an example of "cosmic science fiction", which is told entirely from the perspective of incomprehensibly powerful super-beings over vast stretches of time.
 * Starshield — a seven-part chronicle of the exploits of the eponymous space hero, Starshield is now widely considered quaint and/or corny, though some have noted the remarkable similarity between the Starshield's iconic "starsuit" and the later MJOLNIR PAA.
 * That Girl from Titan — a romantic comedy lampooning the many stereotypes around Sol's colony populations.
 * Translight Tales — a 25th-century retelling of the First Wave and the "golden age" of early slipspace expeditions, with added fictional flourish and romanticization.

Genres

 * Haah 'n' Waaw — an emergent musical genre originally synthesized from the noise of Human-Covenant War-era transmissions warped beyond recognition, of which the name is a loose onomatopoeia.
 * Icecore — a genre of heavy electronic music originating from Europa and having since become a staple of the Jovian Moons' underground dance scene.

Groups

 * Covenant - a flip music band popular in the early 26th century that opted to change its name shortly after the Covenant invasion.