‘Aliens: The Female War’ – Steve Perry & Stephani Perry (Titan Books)

 

Page Count: 261 Pages

When I picked up ‘The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 1’ last week, the plan was to read the three books in between, well… All the other books that are waiting ‘patiently’ in the TBR pile. No urgency, just another way of adding a tiny bit of variety to my reading diet ;o)

And now here I am, a few days later, having just finished off what I can only describe as an ‘Aliens Reading Frenzy’. What happened? Well, my posts on ‘Earth Hive’ and ‘Nightmare Asylum’ can speak for themselves but the bottom line is that fun was in short supply until I found it here. That’s what led me into ‘The Female War’, in record time, let me tell you about it…

Ellen Ripley is back! Waking from a long journey in space with a mysterious hole in her memory, Ripley finds her way to the Gateway station and a meeting with Wilks and Billie. Ripley has the beginnings of a plan, a plan that might help humanity take the Earth back from the Aliens. Ripley also has a secret though, one that she isn’t even aware of herself, and when she finds out what it is… Her plan could quite easily fall apart.

‘The Female War’ is a mess of a book, the sort of mess you get when you suddenly realise that you have four books worth of plot threads to fit into what’s meant to be a trilogy, and you’re already writing the third book. You could trim a few threads here and there, maybe lose a couple entirely. Life isn’t about neat endings (apart from the final one, maybe) so why should a book be any different? That’s not you though, closure is the order of the day and closure is what your readers will have.

Sorry, went off on a little tangent there. Anyway...

That’s what I found in ‘The Female War’, everything has to have a line drawn under it and to be fair, I can see why but only to a point. A lot of this closure ties in to the journeys that Billie and Wilks are on and given that that’s key to the book, I can let it slide to an extent. But that’s the thing… As someone who was there to see a finale to the Alien infestation of Earth, I wasn’t that invested in Billie’s ‘Side Quest’ to rescue Amy, a girl who Billie had only see in video recordings but had to put the mission in jeopardy to rescue, for reasons that I’m still not entirely clear on. And that’s where credibility starts to be stretched a little too much for my liking. Coincidence and happenstance do a little too much work at a point in the book where ‘high stakes’ need to be at the forefront.

Same kind of deal with Ripley’s plot strand… I actually really liked how her re-appearance was handled but I couldn’t help but wonder, what did it do to serve the plot, other than shoe-horn a fan favourite into the book? Like the book wasn’t ‘Alien’ enough already, even though it had actual Aliens in it. Hmmm…

It’s a ‘scattergun approach’ that didn’t quite work for me but by its very nature, will hit the mark for others though. ‘Your mileage will vary and all that’… You’ll have to excuse me, yesterday was a tough day in the office ;o)

All this sounds a bit ominous, doesn’t it? It does, but I couldn’t help but enjoy ‘The Female War’ anyway. You see, I also have a bit of a soft spot for any book that sets itself an impossible goal, then throws everything at the target regardless of whether it sticks or not. ‘The Female War’ throws itself into the proceedings and just goes for it with a real frenetic energy that carried me along effortlessly, just what I was looking for. And by this point of the trilogy, the Perry’s clearly have a real handle on the Aliens, using this to deliver what I can only describe as ‘Aliens on steroids with a side helping of cocaine’. There may well be too much happening for one book but the Aliens are HUGE and there are thousands of them now. Add some pyrotechnics to the proceedings and I was sold.

‘The Female War’ sometimes suffers under the weight of its own plot but ultimately is a fitting finale to a very entertaining trilogy. I’m glad that I bought the next two volumes now, I’m hoping for more of the same.