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A review by verkisto
Aliens: Earth Hive by Steve Perry
1.0
So, this book starts off with two dream sequences. One would have been bad enough, but in order to introduce the two main characters, Newt Billie and Hicks Wilks, Perry puts us through two dream sequences to bring us up to speed. It's a cheap method for character development, though, to be fair, Aliens had one, too.
Earth Hive has a lot of other throwbacks to Aliens, including but not limited to:
--a scene where Wilks shows Billie how to use his weapons;
--"asses and elbows" is used once;
--"It's the only way to be sure" is also used; and
--an android gets torn in half by an alien, in the exact same way Bishop was.
It's ridiculous. I'm not sure what the purpose of all that is, except that maybe the writers really wanted to write the novelization of Aliens and figured this was the closest they'd get.
Now, I don't necessarily want to blame Perry for all this, because this book is actually the novelization of a comic of the same name that was intended to be a sequel to Aliens. The problem was that this book was released the same year Alien³ did, and the publishers of the comic retconned the story to maintain the continuity of Hicks and Newt dying. The problem is that they left the exact. Same. Backstory for both characters, including the scene where Newt's parents find the Space Jockey's ship on LV-426 (here renamed "Rim"). It's so stupidly transparent that I can't even imagine what the publishers thought they were accomplishing here, because the entire time I was reading about these characters, I pictured Hicks and Newt from the movie. I don't see how anyone else couldn't.
Perry doesn't get off completely, though, because at one point one of his characters makes a reference to a character he read in an old book. The name was so specific that I looked it up, and it turns out the character is the lead character in a book Perry wrote. ::eyeroll::
This whole book is a mess, moreso because I'd heard enough good about it to have some high expectations for it. Maybe book two will make a better impression, because there's no way it can be as bad as this one.
Earth Hive has a lot of other throwbacks to Aliens, including but not limited to:
--a scene where Wilks shows Billie how to use his weapons;
--"asses and elbows" is used once;
--"It's the only way to be sure" is also used; and
--an android gets torn in half by an alien, in the exact same way Bishop was.
It's ridiculous. I'm not sure what the purpose of all that is, except that maybe the writers really wanted to write the novelization of Aliens and figured this was the closest they'd get.
Now, I don't necessarily want to blame Perry for all this, because this book is actually the novelization of a comic of the same name that was intended to be a sequel to Aliens. The problem was that this book was released the same year Alien³ did, and the publishers of the comic retconned the story to maintain the continuity of Hicks and Newt dying. The problem is that they left the exact. Same. Backstory for both characters, including the scene where Newt's parents find the Space Jockey's ship on LV-426 (here renamed "Rim"). It's so stupidly transparent that I can't even imagine what the publishers thought they were accomplishing here, because the entire time I was reading about these characters, I pictured Hicks and Newt from the movie. I don't see how anyone else couldn't.
Perry doesn't get off completely, though, because at one point one of his characters makes a reference to a character he read in an old book. The name was so specific that I looked it up, and it turns out the character is the lead character in a book Perry wrote. ::eyeroll::
This whole book is a mess, moreso because I'd heard enough good about it to have some high expectations for it. Maybe book two will make a better impression, because there's no way it can be as bad as this one.