In my teen days I loved reading the original Aliens spin-off novels. The 1986 James Cameron movie is an all-time classic, so of course it spawned an entire range of novels and graphic novels, and even crossovers (blame these for the rise of the Aliens vs Predator franchise… or the game that preceded them).
After a 7-year hiatus, the series returned under a different publisher. Original Sin by Michael Jan Friedman dropped in 2005, followed by DNA War by Diane Carey. These were collected in Omnibus 5, a present I got last Christmas.
The plot this time is set immediately after the movie Alien Resurrection, centuries after the previous films- and novels- take place. Ripley’s clone, along with survivors Call, Johner and Vriess, crash-land in Paris, Earth.
This novel serves to enrich the plot of the original Alien movie (1979), with some interesting theories on what shady company Weyland Yutani knew before The Nostromo spaceship responded to the alien distress beacon. There’s also more light shed on Ripley’s daughter, and we’re introduced to a journalist who wants to expose the story of these aliens ravaging entire planets, before the book descends into the violent, acid-splattered mayhem the franchise is known for. The tropes are all there: the twists, the dodgy companies, the bee-like alien family structure.
Fun, but you know what you’re getting with anything Aliens. There was more that the author could have said about journalism far into the future, but that was sidelined to focus on the alien species. The new series seems more complex than I remember the original books (Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum et al) being.
One difference to my perception of these books these days: When I read the originals, the real-world internet was very small, and my family- like some others- were maybe just getting online at the time. These days, the web is inescapable. I now find myself thinking, years into the future, would they not have an advanced method of sharing info about dangerous parasitic creatures that impregnate you and burst you of your body? Why are people, in this fictional world, not prepared for this?
Overthinking. A fun story.
DNA War opens with a new story strand, with entirely new characters on another planet. Anthropologist Jacosta Malvaux – as pretentious a woman as her name suggests – sets up an outpost to study the aliens. With the belief that she will ‘one day walk among them,’ she begins her investigation and finds that they don’t attack.
However, her son, a gun-for-hire type stationed on another planet, loses contact, and gathers a team to find his mum. The bloodbath a familiar reader will expect doesn’t happen, though. Not at first, at least.
Unusually for the franchise, this novel is told first-person, from Malvaux’s son’s perspective. He takes us down to the planet, where aliens are warring with each other and largely leaving the humans alone. Things, of course, don’t stay that way for long.
This addition presents a few surprising twists, not least that a) Americans are still using imperial measurements centuries into the future, and b) the author decides to switch to metric half way through. There are good sci-fi ideas like cloaking devices that make humans undetectable to aliens, and radio interference affecting both humans and aliens, and bad ideas too, like humans still engaging in marriage and prayer thousands of years into the future. These ideas get more ridiculous as the book goes on, ending with some questions answered, some not.
An enjoyable but corny addition to the canon.
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