Yeah, I think that in this book - but also, in the script that it is adapting - the political climate and worldbuilding and establishing of the relationship between such forces as Weyland-Yutani, the USCM, and the UPP is
much more interesting than the characters' narratives and the evolution of the Aliens. Hicks isn't really much of a character in this story, and that's even after Cadigan enhanced his character from what was there on the page that Gibson left behind.
That's one of the main reasons I'm happy that this script isn't what we actually got as a film back in the day; the Assembly Cut of
Alien 3 remains, to me, the very best of the multitude of potential
Aliens sequel options that we have been presented with, but on the flip side, Gibson's script's ideas and concepts offer a ton of fascinating ideas and concepts that feel so at home in the world of those first three movies that I'm glad to have this novel that explores them in a more fleshed out fashion (and Cadigan's novel is a stronger exploration of those ideas than the source material script in my opinion), and I'm glad that ideas from this iteration of the story, like the UPP and the new Aliens, have been worked into other recent materials like the RPG and
Into Charybdis despite this story itself not having been what we got on screen.
I'd be pretty down to see Pat Cadigan explore a followup in this alternate timeline outside of the main continuity as well, just for the fun of it.