Chadzilla ROARS!!! (The Official Blog of Chadwick H. Saxelid, Writer)

Aliens: DNA War - by Diane Carey

Rory Malvaux is a cop that needs to not only get out of town, he needs to get off the planet itself.  His brutal dispatching of a man that had killed a fellow officer and his family has landed Malvaux in serious trouble, so he takes the job of legal officer on a forty-odd months round trip space mission.  The mission?  Collect a scientific team stationed on Rosamund 6, a habitable planet that has become infested with the dreaded alien Xenomorphs.  Extracting the team proves to be more than a bit of a problem...

Diane Carey's Aliens: DNA War was everything that I had hoped it would be and almost nothing that I dreaded it could be.  It's a short and simple siege story that, despite a chaotic and shaky start, delivers plenty of thrills, chills, and brutal, bloody action.  It does James Cameron's seminal sequel proud.  Well, it does if your only criteria for a good ALIENS book is one that doesn't skimp on the chest-bursting, acid splattering action; and that is precisely where my quality line is drawn.

Character and plot wise, the book offers up the usual collection of space opera/B-movie character types (rogue cop with an attitude, colonial marines, nutball scientist with delusions that she is God incarnate, etc) and runs them through a plot wherein they all have to behave just so in order for the story to work.  There were several times where I could sense a contrivance to get the story from plot point B to plot point C.  But Carey had done such a solid job of constructing her plot that my sense never blossomed into certainty.

Michael Jan Friedman's Aliens: Original Sin, the first book in DH Press's relaunch of their ALIENS series, left me cold.  But Diane Carey's Aliens: DNA War, the imprint's second title offering, had me begging for more.  It was an excellent trip to the literary equivalent of the Drive-In.  I can only hope that my next visit will be every bit as much fun as this one.

At least AVPR has a great tagline.

 

At least I know what I'll be opening on Christmas Day, do you?

Aliens: Original Sin - by Michael Jan Friedman

Clone Ripley and the other survivors of the ill-fated Auriga wage a continuing battle with Weyland-Yutani and Earthgov to prevent yet another outbreak of the dreaded alien menace.  But another alien, one only glimpsed in fossil form back on Acheron, is determined to see that the monstrous creatures return.

Michael Jan Friedman's Aliens: Original Sin is a bumpy start for the Dark Horse Press relaunch of its Aliens tie-in novel series.  Not surprisingly, the story picks up moments after Alien Resurrection, the fourth and, to date, final Alien movie, ends, with the survivors landing on Earth.  The story then jumps ahead in time to a point where Clone Ripley, the android Call, brutish Johner, and the wheelchair bound Vriess (and one or two others) are engaged in some kind of clandestine chicanery that has to do with buried information concerning the "erased histories."  (Anything that has to do with the events that unfolded in Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3.)

Friedman makes a game effort at filling in some of the minor-to-major plot holes in the Alien franchise, but the revelations are hampered by what could be called the "Yeah-but-then" Factor.  Case in point, Friedman asks the reader to believe that a select number of humans (I'm assuming representatives of Weyland-Yutani, the soulless Company that is obsessed with capturing, studying, and somehow profiting off of the acid-blooded creatures) have been in clandestine contact (and business with) the "pilot's people" (Mala'kak) for over three hundred years with no one ever becoming the wiser.  I found that impossible to believe.  It also negates the need to have cloned Ellen Ripley in the first place, because the Company would have, supposedly, limitless access to the alien eggs.  Each revelation seemed to make less sense.

Not helping is that the story is a continuation of my least favorite Alien movie, with the android-with-a-soul Call being the only truly sympathetic character of the bunch.  There is also very little alien action in the book, which is strange.  One would think that an Aliens novel would have move aliens in it.  But the attacks are pretty much confined to the last fifty or sixty pages of the book and read as being rather rushed.

Dark Horse Press unleashes another Aliens book later this year, Aliens: DNA War by Diane Carey.  I am hoping it will be a better one, I can't see how it could be worse.