‘Aliens: Genocide’ – David Bischoff (Titan Books)

 


Page Count: 291 Pages

Another day, another ‘Aliens Omnibus’… Well, half an ‘Aliens Omnibus’ ;o) It’s not quite how I saw this years reading going (although I did buy the books so I really should have seen it coming at some point) but I’m enjoying it nonetheless. That love of ‘sci-fi horror’ has never really left me and the xenomorphs do it so well. And if that wasn’t enough, it always fun to watch dysfunctional groups of Colonial Marines pour ridiculous amounts of bullets etc into the Aliens, reducing them to acid drenched chunks of… Well, whatever they’re made of. What are the Aliens made of? Anyone? Anyway…

Yesterday was a ‘commuting day’ and that led me to go looking for a book that would wake me up, in the morning, but would also be something that I could relax with on the bus home. Sounded like just the right time to pick up an ‘Aliens’ tie-in novel… ;o)

The Alien Queen is dead, the hive mind left to flounder… and on a world bereft of its leader, two strains of Alien divide their forces for world shattering, acid drenched war. On Earth, in the wake of the Alien infestation, athletes are flocking to humanity’s Goodwill Games. But some come with a deadly new tool; a drug called Fire, distilled from the essence of the Aliens’ body chemistry.

The military wants it. Pharmaceutical kingpin Daniel Grant wants it. But the only place the essential ingredient can be found is on that terrible world, convulsed by Alien civil war…

‘Aliens: Genocide’ ended up being the ideal ‘commute read’… Familiar enough that it didn’t require too much from me, in the morning anyway, but enough fun that I wanted to stick with it. There’s nothing new here but it’s done well enough that it doesn’t really matter. Like I said at the top of the post, Aliens vs. Colonial Marines is always good for a dose of horror and explosive spectacle.

The plot is slight but the concept, and its execution, more than make up for this. We’re looking at a heist on the Alien homeworld, a world that just so happens to be at war with itself in the worst way imaginable. And if that wasn’t enough, the raiding party is also carrying the potential seeds of its own destruction. Bischoff plays these two elements off against each other, resulting in a book where human greed and rapacious xenos hunger conspire to send the plot spiralling off in different directions, often at a moments notice. Again, just the kind of book for when you want something to take your mind off the trip into work (and put a little distance between you and the office on the way home).

The ‘mystery’ is a little too obvious to be really engaging, and is explained a little too glibly to really work. Does that matter here though? Well, that’s going to depend on the reader. ‘Alien: Genocide’ doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, a very good excuse to set Aliens against Marines and see what happens next, even though we all know what’s going to happen next. If you’re after more than that? Well, you’ve stopped off at the wrong book but I think you already knew that, didn’t you?

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