Aliens: The Female War
By Steve Perry & Stephani Perry
I enjoy the Alien novels, they are trashy, ridiculous and almost all the ones I’ve read so far have been based on a comic I’ve then needed to go buy because I want to, often they are as good as the book, sometimes the comic is better.
This is the third book in the series, why start here? Why not? I finished this this afternoon in a single sitting, and it’s all fresh in my memory, there will be spoilers so don’t read this if you don’t want any.
Story so far, the Earth has been lost to the Xenomorphs, most of the inhabitants are dead, some fled offworld, some live on stations orbiting the world still receiving the odd transmission from those left behind. Wilks and Billie (formally known as Hicks and Newt before having to be renamed because Alien 3 killed them off) have escaped after being brought to earth by an idiot soldier who thought he could control the Xenomorphs.
And to the story, some people are having nightmares aboard these space stations including Rippley and Newt about a Super Queen on a distant planet, figuring that others are also having these dreams they get a friend of Wilks to hack the computer and see who else is having these nightmares and organise them into a team to hunt her down.
Their new gang of ten people who individually don’t matter go and grab the SQ (Super Queen) with minimum effort despite having to fight drones the size of a normal queen, they only lose 3 people and toss the SQ in the boot of their space ship and take her to Earth where they plan to set off some nukes to kill all the aliens on the planet. They plan to do this by dropping the SQ off and then flying to a hidden nuke base Rippley knows of near exclusively, the SQ summons all the aliens on earth to it before advancing on the nuke base, the base is busted up and the humans have to fix all the cabling before the aliens arrive they do so and shoot off into orbit and get ready to fire the Nukes on the Xeno Army annnnnnnnnd then the book ends, you don’t read of the boom or its carnage as the books ends before hand.
I know, you’re thinking this is a master piece but in all honesty it’s fun, I didn’t go into this expecting it to be the next classic, I mean it was written in 1993 and has less than 2000 reviews on GoodReads (my favourite site for tracking book read so far) a lot of people won’t have even heard of it but it’s just a bit of fun, it’s got all the bad Sci-Fi book tropes, it’s got bad sex scenes, someone hacks a government computer, hypersleep and a secret Android which all Alien books can’t go without (it’s Ripley) but it does the main job a book should do, it entertains and is enjoyable that’s why I liked it, so I’ll give this book solid 4/5 even if the main story was nonsensical
