Tor has hired Hugo Award-winner Greg Bear (most recently, the author of "City at the End of Time") to write three novels about the popular video game series, Halo. The publisher has already sold a million copies of three other Halo books.

The new trilogy will focus on an ancient race of aliens that left behind mysterious and powerful machines in the Halo universe. If you want to know more about the franchise, GalleyCat had that video interview with Eric Nylund about how his writing took off after he wrote for the video game--he's written Halo books, stand-alone novels, and video games.

Here's more from the Tor release: "'We're thrilled to have Greg Bear join a great tradition of sci-fi writers who've inhabited the 'Halo' universe, and Greg's incredible sense of epic scale and wonder is the perfect match' ... said Frank O'Connor, Franchise Development Director for Halo, at Microsoft Game Studios."