Recently read Aliens Original Sin for the first time. Quite a bizarre story where not a lot really happens save for a few chapters with startling pre-Prometheus revelations about the origins of the Space Jockeys. The core story itself I found really quite mundane about a sparsely populated botanical colony with a number of garden domes. The characters populating this place were not very interesting save for maybe the main administrator and his head of security, Shepard. A new breed of Alien is also present that is larger and with a bigger head. Although there is only a single egg and facehugger in the story there are multiple Aliens present which is explained thanks to a multiple chest-burster scenario which would later feature in AVP Requiem.
We get Ripley back and she is portrayed here as some kind of vigilante antihero and since the events of Resurrection the surviving crew of the Betty have sworn total allegiance to her. Ripley's mission seems to be about raiding various installations and using Call to hack into the mainframe to discover what the likes of Earth Gov and Weyland-Yutani knew of the Alien and the Space Jockey. One character, Simioni, seems to have been invented simply for the sole purpose for Ripley to explain via exposition all the unanswered mysteries from the original Alien film. Needless to say, the explanation is very, very poor and I'm glad the films never went down this route, although its clear the novel tries to set up the Loki as a new villain for the expanded universe.
Aside from perhaps Call, I was surprised the Betty took a backseat in this story. Vriess for example sits out a majority of the action simply because his paralysis means he cannot lower himself down from the Betty into the botanical dome. Johner is just the same as always and the new crew members are largely uninteresting and simply serve as canon fodder for the aliens.
Overall I wasn't impressed with this story. It has a very mundane premise and the story is nothing we haven't seen a dozen times before. The author seems to be totally reliant on the inclusion of Ripley and the revelations about the Space Jockeys and sadly neither worked for me here.