I don't read too many of these, but my friend Justin (author of The Good Guy and more, and also my co-host on The Wordy Pair) gave me this Aliens omnibus, with three novels in there.
The first one, Earth Hive (which I keep remembering wrongly as Hive Earth) was surprisingly good.
It was written by Steve Perry, who does a ton of movie novelizations and spin-offs, but perhaps more interestingly, he wrote four Conan novels, too. (I've read that his take on Conan is a little overblown and silly, but getting four Conan books is some serious post-pulp cred)
Most of this book is actually not about the Earth Hive, oddly enough. It's mostly about a group of marines who are headed to (maybe?) the alien homeworld to gather samples for the government. If you want more spoilers than that, check out the spoiler section in the embedded video.
The prose is a bit clinical at times, and often just functional, but it also has some descriptions that are pretty stomach-churning. It's better written than I thought it would be.
Of course, there are also some silly bits: I think Steve goes through all the possible ways to describe the shape of an alien's head in this book. ("Banana" appears more than once.)
I also get the odd impression that Steve was just throwing in gun terminology from the movie willy-nilly, because some of it doesn't make too much sense. His use of the word "caseless" seems to suggest he doesn't know what that does or why someone might do it, and some of his statements about caliber and interchangeability are downright weird.
Which is strange, because when I looked him up he was born and grew up in the deep South. I imagine he knows more about guns than he seems to in this book.
The characters are ripped from a variety of backgrounds, much like the movie Alien, and they are consistently characterized, if a bit static. To be fair, lots of them die ignominiously. There are several different factions with different plans for the aliens, from the government, corporations, colonists, and cultists (believe it or not!).
There is a bit of salacious material in the book that isn't out of place, but probably isn't too necessary either. Just a warning for those who care.
There are even some neat ideas in this book, such as the possibility that alien drones can become queens (countered by Alien 3 but this book came out only a few months after that movie), android soldiers needing to be more human in some ways to be effective, a clever justification for the modification of Asimov's First Law the androids must follow, and a bit of clever exploration of what happens when aliens are introduced to a world with as much life as Earth.
There are some more, but I'll leave those in the spoiler section of the video.
All in all, it was a fun, easy, short read with a good literary reference that "got" me. There are some oblique references to the Aliens movie but the book is surprisingly sparse with member-berries. There are a few questionable plot elements, maybe to be explained in later books?
I like the first two Alien movies, but the series has had so many stinkers at this point that I probably would have never bothered to pick this up if someone hadn't given it to me. I was pleasantly surprised.
And, if you feel like it, go check out my short story Jade Cargo, which has a bit of an Alien feel to it!
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