”Eat hot plasma death, alien scum,” Blake said. Bueller stared at her. “I always wanted to say that,” she said.
Maybe the comics were better.
Though I didn’t know it going in, The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1 includes author Steve Perry’s three book novelization of the first Dark Horse Comics’ Alien stories. Set after the Aliens movie, the series was originally written as a coda to the second movie, following survivors Hicks and Newt after their return from LV-426. But that was before the shitshow of Aliens3. With Hicks and Newt casually butchered off-screen in the first frames of that flick, Perry (and Dark Horse) had to retcon their two main characters into newcomers Wilks and Billie.
Unfortunately, since it’s a retcon, Wilks and Billie share identical backstories to the original characters – right down to the scars on Wilks’s face from his brush with the xenomorphs’ acid blood in the second movie. With identical Alien invasions of two planets with identical outcomes, it’s just dumb. It also robs the story of a number of emotional beats that the original creators clearly meant to be important (as the ‘old’ band comes back together), and for the new reader (like me) unfamiliar with the publishers’ backstory, it’s distracting. I kept scratching my head through most of the first book trying to puzzle past the continuity hitches.
Setting that aside (these problems aren’t really of the original creators’ making), the first book Earth Hive is the omnibus’s strongest entry, the better part of it delivering a white-knuckle assault on an Alien nest by a group of space marines. It climaxes with a wicked twist as the surviving marines make their escape, clicking a major plot point into place with a rather deftly delivered surprise. Unfortunately, the good in this one is sandwiched between a far too ambitious backstory involving corporate exploitation of the xenomorphs and an Alien-worshipping religious cult that eventually leads to the earth’s infestation. Throw in a living version of the elephant-trunked alien from the first Alien movie (who arrives deus ex machina just in time to keep the plot going, but never comes back in the series) and it’s ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ mixed into this one.
The second book Nightmare Asylum introduces us to the stereotypical, megalomaniacal sociopathic general Thomas A.W. Spears who is hatching a plot to lead his own army of aliens to take back earth (because the ‘aliens-to-weapons’ strategy has worked SO WELL all the other times it’s been tried). Wilks and Billie prove remarkably inept protagonists this time around as they lead a failed coup against Spears, get all their allies killed, loose the asteroid base to the xenomorphs, and then fail a second time to kill Spears in space. Not to worry though. Predictably, once Spears makes earthfall his alien soldiers eat him in a paragraph or two. Outside of a surprise ending, this one really is ‘much ado about nothing.’
The Female War, the final volume of the series, brings everything to a head in a dodgy storyline that takes the protagonists to yet another alien-infested planet to capture a new uber-queen xenomorph who, when brought to earth, will summon all the terrestrial aliens together, allowing the humans to nuke this new mega-hive and take back their planet. By this point, Perry (now joined in the writing chores by his daughter Stefani) must have be forewarned that Aliens3 had fubar'ed his main characters, and the introduction and retcon of another character from the original movies is handled much better here. Unfortunately, outside of that, the last book in this series offers nothing really new. The pursuit, capture, and deposit of the uber-queen on earth feels rather rote and there’s never much meat put on the bone to explain her significance -- except as a plot device that gives the heroes a way to kill millions of aliens with one button push.
There’s also a tonal issue with the books. Alien was always adult sci-fi, but it was never ‘dirty.’ This round of books though seems to lean more heavily into the trope that all scary movies benefit from both a ‘high body and booby count’ as a lot of gratuitous sex gets included. Far from me to be prudish, but having Billie strip to salaciously lure some bad-buy marines into a hallway sex act -- while the base is being overrun by face-ripping aliens mind you! -- seems outlandishly stupid and prurient. Wilks and Billie’s sharing showers is worse though and just outright disturbing. With the characters modeled on Hicks and Newt, the Aliens movie (and even the first book in this series) set an almost surrogate father-daughter relationship between the two. To have it turn sexual is both unrealistic -- not to mention ‘icky’ – and just feels like lazy writing.
I do love the Alien franchise and maybe after hitting a string of very good, licensed property books, my expectations for this series were a bit too high. Consider me disappointed because while there were some good things about these stories, The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1 was more miss than hit.