Aliens: Bug Hunt - Aliens Anthology Announced!

[HybridNewborn]

Audiobook is out! Finishing up West Cork and then will be starting in on the Bug Hunt.

[HybridNewborn]

While most of the If It Bleeds stories either state outright when they take place, or are pretty easy to peg, is there a list somewhere for when all the stories here in Bug Hunt take place, roughly? Trying to place them in my timelines.

[SM]

Here.

[The Old One]

Here.

In the Weyland Century you've got a typo where the Covenant is concerned. See; "Convenant"

[HybridNewborn]

Thanks much!

[SM]

You're very welcome.

[Xenomrph]

Here.

Looks like SM finally got rid of my co-author credit on that page for whatever reason. Huh.

[Local Trouble]

...awkward...

[HybridNewborn]

So I've only just finished up the first story, and maybe it was a mistake to go through this with Cold Forge so recent in my mind, but stuff that was exemplary in Cold Forge just isn't handled here well at all. Take the first story for instance. In it we have a generic setup; WY crew sent out to Zeta Reticuli (couldn't even make up a new system), come across xenos, the company tells them it wants one, shit ensues, etc. It's all paint by numbers. Not very interesting at all. Secondly, and made all the more glaring by Cold Forge actually addressing it, is the fact that the "Leapers" are humanoid, despite the only native life around being apparently these big floating jellyfish things. The story is just lazily constructed by inserting plot A into setting B and filling in a bunch of Aliensverse sounding names.

The next one is by Dan Abnett, who I know can write a story and whose worked I've enjoyed before, so fingers crossed the anthology gets better from here on out.

Perhaps it's because I, while liking Aliens decently enough, am not as crazy in love with it as others are (including it seems the editor of the anthology) but I get the impression this body of work may take me a while to get through...

[426Buddy]

Good luck, I disliked most of the book myself. In hindsight, i should not have purchased it.

And considering that I have around 4 versions of earth war, thats really saying something.

[SM]

There are some decent ones.  Most are average.  Some less so.

[426Buddy]

Yeah made it sound like the worst book ever in that post, which its not. i did enjoy a couple of the stories.

But the there is at least one really bad one. Nothing in the book was very memorable... other than how dire that andromeda galaxy story is.

Also im slowly getting started on "If it bleeds", not been too impressed with that either. But i'm only a couple stories in.

[SM]

Yeah the Andromeda one is "less so". 

[HybridNewborn]

Also im slowly getting started on "If it bleeds", not been too impressed with that either. But i'm only a couple stories in.

I was really impressed with If it Bleeds, overall. There were a handful of stories where my attention wandered a bit, but I enjoyed the lot of them in the end. Made me wish there were audiobooks of the old AvP novels, or the movie novelizations.

[HuDaFuK]

The next one is by Dan Abnett, who I know can write a story and whose worked I've enjoyed before, so fingers crossed the anthology gets better from here on out.

Abnett's Reaper is actually one of my favourites from the book (and one of probably two or three I thought was really damn good), so I hope you like it.

To recap what I've said about it before: On the whole, I thought the anthology was merely OK. A few great stories, a few awful ones (one in particular is a total crock that reminded me of Eric Red's God-awful Alien 3 script, if you've ever had the misfortune to read that), with the rest of the shorts falling somewhere in between. The ones featuring Marines from Aliens are by-and-large a total bust. The better ones use original characters. On average, the second half of the book is better than the first. Definitely not as consistently great as the Predator book.