Every year, I find myself wishing for another entry into the Alien series. There are always plenty of things on offer, with games both digital and physical being produced alongside various other merchandise, but I never fully get my fix unless another film comes out. Now and again though I’m reminded that there is a considerably extensive collection of spin-off novels and comics to whet my appetite and I find myself still uncertain as to whether or not they’re a good substitute. My curiosity got the better of me during lockdown when I read not one but three novels that had been recently published – Alien: Echo, Alien 3: The Original Screenplay, and Aliens: Phalanx. The last one in particular blew me away and convinced me that there is the possibility to tell interesting and exciting stories in Alien despite the many decades since its initial release dulling the tension a bit through countless recycling.
So, with that time once again for me wishing another Alien would be released (I already am excited for the Fede Alvarez production underway), I decided to take a look into the first novels I’m aware of since Prometheus – the Alien: Out of the Shadows trilogy. Three novels released in 2014 – Out of the Shadows, Sea of Sorrow, and River of Pain – which were promoted as being part of the canonical timeline of the original Alien quadrilogy. The results of this premise are mostly to its detriment. In truth, once I had finished the final book, I found I had finally encountered the loosest understanding of the word ‘trilogy’ I could think of. There are three things tying all three books together: their release date, the xenomorphs, and Ripley being somehow shoehorned into each of these stories despite being hundreds of years apart from one another.
Alien: Out of the Shadows is serviceable enough as a story. Its action is immediate, and the overall impression it leaves is like a run through an extreme haunted house (one infested with xenos) but it never fully gets a chance to become exciting because of its required connection to Ellen Ripley. The premise is that on a mining planet some decades after Alien but before Aliens, the miners on said planet come across a lifeboat containing a woman by the name of Ripley who has been adrift since her crew were killed visiting LV-246. This planet is coincidentally also run amuck with xenos like the one Ripley encountered and she finds herself trying to survive once again but with a new crew. Why she doesn’t remember any of this when it comes time to Aliens is unnaturally resolved by a recurring scene of Ripley’s daughter being killed over and over again, becoming so unbearable that Ripley demands her memories of this entire experience be removed from her mind through a medical pod. As Ripley drifts off in space again for another few decades, you can’t help but be left feeling like the whole thing was quite pointless.
Then there’s Alien: Sea of Sorrows. Set around the time of Alien: Resurrection, this is by far the most creatively ambitious and silliest of the three. A deputy commissioner named Decker finds himself in an accident on the mining planet from Out of the Shadows where his injury in the hive causes him to gain the ability to psychically connect to the xenomorphs (yes, really), hearing their thoughts and feeling their need to kill. This draws the attention of Weyland-Yutani who want Decker to go back to the mining planet and help a group of mercenaries retrieve a living xenomorphs and egg or else find himself forever imprisoned and experimented on by the company themselves. We learn that Decker is the long lost ancestor of Ripley and this ancestry is also known by the xenomorphs somehow who now set their sights on killing him out of revenge. Naturally, almost everyone dies, a handful escape, and the novel ends again being of little consequence as it’s set so far out from anything else in the franchise.
Finally, Alien: River of Pain concludes the trilogy by telling the story of what happened to the colony on Hadley’s Hope, the setting of Aliens before the xenomorphs ran amok. This one bears no connection to the prior two but is more closely tied to the James Cameron film, recreating several early scenes from the film and sprinkling them throughout the book. It’s the strongest of the three by remembering the key to the film’s success was its pacing and allowing the characters a chance to breath. Even if we know what will happen to the characters we come across (there is only one survivor when Ripley arrives in Hadley’s Hope after all), the novel does capture this sense of tragic abjectivity as families and children are unceremoniously killed off or dragged away by an overwhelming number of xenomorphs. Not that I would feel compelled to read any of the three again but if I were to, this would definitely be the one.
Sadly, it is a weak trilogy but I never found myself bored or angry about the novels. They were serviceable filler, not necessarily the highest compliment, but clearly the books were to satiate Alien fans and to a certain extent it succeeds. After finishing them now, I find myself already looking at the latest release, Alien: Enemy of my Enemy and hope that I might get more out of it to satisfy me until the next film finally gets released.
Chronicler of the Dark 