I didn't expect to review this book this week. I needed something to kill half an hour and I thought I'd give this book a look. The same friend who gave me that three-novel Alien omnibus gave me this book, too, and I hadn't opened it yet.
The funny thing is, despite the relatively bad first impression I got from the book, it did a few interesting things that are worth noticing! I kept turning pages, and ended up finishing the book pretty quickly.
I'm talking about Alien: The Cold Forge, by Alex White, published in 2018. The front cover says it's an "All New Story" and "An Original Novel," and aside from a couple of early-on member-berries (mentions of Van Leeuwen and Carter Burke), it's true.
Let's start off with the first impressions. The prominent characters are all unlikeable sociopaths, with a strong tendency to hyper-edgy and gritty behavior, which I found a bit irritating. From a purely technical perspective, it's fairly well done, but it's also so extreme that it's cartoonish.
The other main bad impression was from the book being written in the present tense. There are reasons to write in the present tense, but in this case it feels more like a manifestation of a "try-hard" attitude. Fortunately, despite the greatly increased opportunities for errors, White manages to pull it off without any obvious errors that I could see.
Despite these fairly negative first impressions, there are a few things this book does well. For instance, White plays around in an interesting way with the alien life cycle to create a neat dilemma and opportunity for subterfuge.
He also does an expert job of expanding the action in the second half of the book. The first half of the book covers a decent span of time, something like two weeks or maybe a bit more. About halfway through the book, it felt as if the story was almost over. However, White manages to dig in and turn the final two hours of the story into the whole second half of the book! This kind of ability to go from a pretty standard compressed narrative to a very detailed, moment-by-moment account of a complex action scene is worth pointing out.
The prose is generally good, vivid and gritty with solid descriptions. There's a lot of slang but it's handled well. The tone is dark and pessimistic. The characters are constantly plotting against each other. They have some "development" here and there, but there's unfortunately no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The plot is fun and action-packed, but also kind of nonsensical if you sit back and think about it.
It was good enough to keep me turning pages, at least.
In the end, I've got mixed feelings about the book. It has bad and good points aplenty. If you like the Alien universe and don't mind the try-hard present tense or the super-edgy characters, you might like it. Otherwise, you may want to give it a pass.
As usual, more spoilers in the Spoiler Section of the video review, going from 11:09 to 28:49.
Grab a copy of the book here if you want to.
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