I for one heavily agree with you, the novel itself felt as if Bear thought to himself "Screw canon and logic! I'm going to write a book that twists the Halo canon on its' head, and if anyone complains then they can just suck it up". I was VERY disappointed with this book, and wished I could get my money back.
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Screw Halo canon? We knew absolutely nothing about Forerunners, their relationship with humans, or their (and our pre-activation) society, before Cryptum. You can't retcon something that hasn't been implemented into the canon before. It may not have sounded like a Halo novel compared to something like Ghosts of Onyx or Fall of Reach, but there's no crime in changing the tone. The only problem I had was that it was too short.
Borne By Storms
Dude, check out the Iris viral campaign and the Halo 3 Terminals. Bungie's writers gave us both of those (meaning they override the books in terms of canon), and they apparently contradict the books on several matters; in particular, Iris' fifth episode pretty much states that the Forerunners first discovered Earth and humanity shortly before the end of the war, which kinda doesn't mesh with the books' insistence that there was a previous San'Shyuum/Human empire that the Forerunners ended up thrashing in a war. Also, in light of what I've heard about the characterization of Forerunner culture, I think I liked it better when they were Benevolent Precursors.
but HOW?
Dude, check out the Iris viral campaign and the Halo 3 Terminals. Bungie's writers gave us both of those (meaning they override the books in terms of canon), and they apparently contradict the books on several matters; in particular, Iris' fifth episode pretty much states that the Forerunners first discovered Earth and humanity shortly before the end of the war, which kinda doesn't mesh with the books' insistence that there was a previous San'Shyuum/Human empire that the Forerunners ended up thrashing in a war. Also, in light of what I've heard about the characterization of Forerunner culture, I think I liked it better when they were Benevolent Precursors.
but HOW?
On reading the episode, and in light of Primordium's revelations, I can still see it fitting the Saga's canon. And I sort of understand your opinion (I shared it a bit after reading Cryptum), but, again with Primordium out, I see much more potential with a divided, contentious Forerunner empire than simple Benevelont Precursors.
But you didn't read the books, apparently. I'll admit, the supposed "changes" to the canon sound hard to accept from something like a wiki article or this site's character page, but really, you'd have to read the book to get the full experience of it.
Borne By Storms
To add on to these comments more than a year later, it should be noted that the last book in the trilogy actually incorporates a lot of Bungie-era canon into its story, even a certain line in the opening cutscene to "Two Betrayals" that jump-started lot of WMGs back in the early 2000s.
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Iris was non-canon even back in Bungie times.
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Prepare the rifles...
...because I might as well be executed for this. This book felt more like fanfiction than an actual novel. Prehistoric humans being spacefairing? Human-San'Shyuum alliance? The origin of the Flood? Maybe this would work better as an original novel, but as a Halo book it somehow didn't fit. In all my years as a reader, never before has a book absolutely destroyed my suspension of disbelief in the first pages of the first chapter. This might as well be called "Greg Bear Writes Halo Fanfiction Book 1."
I truly wanted to like this book. Hopefully the next two books are better, but this was a really bad way to begin. Sorry, everyone. Just my honest opinion.