Quote from: guymelfe on Sep 02, 2020, 02:29:56 AM
I actually have Tribes. I seem to recall it being quite good, so I'll go dig it out. What do you think of the Out of Shadows/Sea of Sorrows/River of Pain Trilogy? Seems weird to have a trilogy written by three different authors, but I've seen good comments elsewhere about it though I seem to recall a reddit post saying book 3 had to do some major retconning to make it all work.
It feels like a bit of a stretch to call them a trilogy,
trio might be more appropriate. They're not really all that connected aside from holding a stronger continuity than the books from previous license holders Bantam and DH press did, which were all stand-alone or comic adaptations. The trio were a big deal when they came out in 2014 because they were the first original novels to come out of the new license holder Titan and they all had stronger ties with each other in general and with the films, which was a stylistic departure from the aforementioned novels which were specifically divergent from the films.
The cool thing about this era of content creation is that Josh Izzo was pulling the strings for license content at Fox at the time and he made a badass effort at tying everything together with his later named Read/Watch/Play initiative. So there's all this sweet tied-in cross-platform content between the comics, games, novels and audio-dramas. It was the most ambitious effort of its kind since the whole Star Wars Shadows of the Empire thing in the late 90's. Rage War, Out of the Shadows, River of Pain, Sea of Sorrows, the Cold Forge, and even the Aliens: Descent attraction, were all a part of this.
The Titan stuff in general is pretty awesome and skips all over the timeline, but they actually cared about continuity so it was a a lot more fun for me. A lot of people gripe and complain about the conceit of having a small marine contingent assigned to the Hadley's Hope colony in River of Pain, mostly because of the number of colonists found cocooned in the movie being a match for those expected, but it's actually a stroke of genius by whoever had the idea, probably Izzo, because the 20+ marine bodies from the book and the added Weyland Yutani scientists serve to cover up the missing colonists that should have gone unaccounted for after having escaped aboard the Onager. The Audible drama for River of Pain even works the Onager reference in to the fall of Hadley's Hope from the story, pretty brilliant in my opinion, but this is another subtle thing that most casual readers aren't going to put together, only the terminally dorky. The Onager itself is a tie-in with this huge comic crossover Fire and Stone which itself even manages to have small cameo from 2001's Aliens versus Predator 2 game. I was very stoked about this time period in the franchise and now I am very sad that it has passed.
River of Pain is mostly standalone, fitting primarily within the time frame of the film Aliens. The other novels share LV-178 as a big throughline element which extends into the VR attraction Descent and further into the prologue for the legitimate trilogy Rage War. Fun stuff all. Out of the Shadows is a genuine Ripley adventure and Sea of Sorrows mostly just follows up on that novel.