Quote from: Corporal Hicks on Jun 17, 2016, 07:56:32 AM
The thing I was disappointed most with Female War was no resolution to the Jockey storyline.
Yeah, while I mostly enjoyed the rest of it, that was notably absent.
Steel Egg 2/5So, I love that John Shirley felt he needed a personal introduction to the book to explain to us that he solved the problem of how chestbursters grow into xenomorphs. Because they f**king eat. Wow.
This book again suffers from the same problems as Original Sin and DNA War, not a single character I feel the need to root for. Not even any characters who I love to hate. No good villains. Reynolds as a mad scientist felt pretty typical. There could've been some type of reversal revealing him as a more well rounded character, but nope. Mad scientist all the way, completely unredeemable sociopath from square one. Nothing relatable about him in the least bit. Can't say I'm surprised. The Alien series is pretty anti-scientist. Look at Ash in Alien or Wren in Resurrection, and then of course the countless ones in the comics and I'm also guessing the other Bantam book adaptations as well.
Also, for being the 'first' encounter with Xenomorphs...again, wow. So, a ship finds a derelict alien spacecraft and find eggs on board. Well f**k me if that isn't the exact plot of Alien. Nicely done, very creative. Shirley also is clearly not actually a fan of the property. You can tell by his incessant use of 'The Company' throughout the book. This book was published in 2007, Weyland-Yutani was no secret. Even shitty AvP worked in tons of back story for the Weyland side of things and whatnot, but Shirley decided he'd needlessly retcon this stuff to add in the UN vs. Communism angle. What's up with the nationalism I've encountered here? Steel Egg is somehow an anti-communist story, which in 2007 is pretty worthless unless Shirley thought it was still 1957. He even worked in a line that their discoveries would be the greatest 'since Eric the Red discovered America.' Okay, man. You do you, I guess. There was a line about the CANC ending all freedom on planet Earth if they took the giant ship back with them, which received an audible laugh from me. This is just stupid, clumsy subtext to me at best, and at worst it's actually a misguided attempt to turn the Alien series into some kind of pedestal for idiots to air their political grievances. Ironically, Alien is actually an anti-capitalist series if it's going to be classified as taking any political stance. And I have to say, if anyone found the UNIC ship named 'Al Gore' to be remotely humorous, I both envy you and feel bad for you at the same time. "Haha, in the future Al Gore will have a spaceship named after him because Global Warming turned out to be real!"
Also noticed in DNA War that Diane Carey felt necessary on 2 occasions to remind readers how bad Stalin was. Twice! The second line was something like "Lenin was bad, Stalin was worse." First of all, it's not a f**king contest who the worst dictator in history was, which is the exact mentality of people like her who need everyone around them to know that 'Stalin was the worst!' Again, all that's happening here is the author's outing herself as some kind of reactionary, and what a laughable soapbox to be standing on when no one reading these books is here for that kind of bullshit. But that's DNA War.
Steel Egg just suffers from the same issues that all of these Dark Horse Press novels have so far (still have Cauldron to go). They don't feel like Alien tonally at all. The dialogue is shit in most cases, characters simply aren't characterized. The Aliens are barely a threat, and when they are they're not scary at all. It just really seems to me that the DHP editor overseeing this 6 book series and the representatives from Fox who oversaw it on their end just didn't give a shit about the property at all. I think it was evident to me from reading No Exit. If Brian f**king Evenson can't turn out a complete Aliens novel with what he had done in his career up to that point, then no one writing in this series was going to be able to. Criminal Enterprise is certainly the most complete, well-rounded of the 5 I've read, and even it barely has anything to do with the title characters.