Reviews tagging 'Death'

Aliens: Nightmare Asylum by Steve Perry

1 review

ladylothlorien's review

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

There was some okay action in this one and some good tense sequences but wow was this book just sexist AF and with a truly bonkers antagonist. I don’t think it’s spoilery to say Billie is overly sexualized in that way male writers of action/sci-fi have. I don’t mind her being a sexual being but she has almost zero agency in it.
She has a couple of nightmares, one involving being raped by Wilks and one where aliens interrupt sex with her Android boyfriend in a gruesome way. To distract some guards, she strips naked and lures them away to where her allies ambush them (seriously this is the only plan they have?). And then she has sexual thoughts about Wilks in the shower and he has similar thoughts about her. When she and her allies are knocked out by the enemy soldiers, Billie is moaning in her sleep because she’s having a sex dream about her Android boyfriend; her allies do not have sex dreams while they are unconscious.
These things only happen to Billie and it’s just infuriating. Look I’m not reading this for great character development. I want people to be chased by aliens and some of them outsmart the aliens and survive. But the sexism was just so pervasive, much more than the previous book in the series. 

Then there’s the antagonist and I don’t mean the aliens.
He’s a military general who is trying to tame aliens. Like get them to learn to fight for him on command. He does this by training the alien queen to tell her drone aliens to do what the general wants or he burns her eggs. Wait it gets better! At one point, the general GIVES THE ALIENS GUNS. Literally. He’s trying to teach them to shoot guns but he explains the drones are so stupid it’s like giving a monkey a gun so they’re not very accurate. Legit this man’s plan is to take his trained alien troops to Earth to fight the “wild aliens” and retake the planet.
He’s exactly the kind of sociopathic asshole that you love to see get his comeuppance (and of course it happens in exactly the way that you would think), but he’s a cartoonish villain and the tone of the book just doesn’t match his absurdity. Also the man managed to find a way to make aliens less scary with his ludicrous plans. 

Honestly if Ripley wasn’t in the next book (and one of the writers is female) I would be abandoning these old novels and sticking to the newer ones which are generally much better.
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