Честно казано не съм сигурна колко звезди да дам на книгата. Историята бе интересна, но първата половина ми бе на моменти досадна. Разбира се осъзнавам и че по начина и написване читателите имат възможността да се привържат повече към някои от героите и тяхната история. Все пак с напредването на историята ми ставаше по-любопитно как ще се развие поредната битка на Рипли. Нещо, което бих искала да кажа за българското издание е, че слава Богу не е пълно с правописни грешки от недоглеждане или по други причини. А това често може да бъде голям проблем за мен и впечатлението ми от дадена книга. Може би бих дала 3,5 звезди, но за целта ще оставя няколко дни да минат след прочитането на книгата, за да си дам по-ясна представа за това до колко ми е харесала :)

There are 2 reasons for this score. 1st is I am a huge fan of the Alien movies. 2nd is because the author tried to create a world with such deep conspiracy.
Apart from that sloppy writing with no suspense, unanswered questions and forgettable characrets.

I think I expected more from it

I love anything from the alien universe and I was so excited to find another story with Ripley. It's good to know she's still out in the universe kicking xenomorph butt.

As a sequel to the Aliens movies, this was a little disappointing. I was hoping for something... bigger, either in the action or the suspense, or at least something that would drive the story of Ripley onwards. Though it did set up for a continued story in the end, this book in itself did little for the overall story. But as a stand-alone Aliens story with the characters from the Aliens franchise, it was still enjoyable.

As in most aliens-stories, you won't see the monster until it's too late. It's the same here. It's not until the very end we actually encounter the creepy aliens, and when we do... they doesn't feel like the monsters we've come to know and fear from earlier novels, games and movies.
The monsters are supposed to be of a new and more dangerous kind, but after reading the novel they feel... weaker, slower and more stupid than their predecessors.
There's a lot of questions left unanswered. Not the kind which makes you think or ponder, but the other kind. the one where you just gets irritated: Did all of those monster come from the same host? What is Loki? How could a ship, there heroes had full knowledge of manage to ambush them? How did the monsters manage to multiply and why did it only take about two hours?

One of the most interesting bits of the Aliens expanded universe is how every new author adds a bit more to the mythos. This is the exception. It's hollow, plastic and two dimensional. There's not a single character I cared about. There was nothing exciting and nothing to make me want to read on.
A pity really, and I don't even think it's the authors fault. It reeks of executive medling, but I might be wrong there.

Disclaimer: This less than glowing review has more to do with my own baggage than the writing itself.

The Good:

Some very good pacing when the you-know-what hits the fan.

I love the characters of Ripley 8 and Call so I was very happy to learn a bit more about them.

The space biodomes were a new and interesting setting.

The Meh:

I don't like the character of Johner and Alien: Resurrection is my least favorite movie in the franchise because of this character (love Ron Perlman--don't like Johner). I was hoping that this book would give Johner at least one redeeming quality (it tried in the Epilogue but it wasn't believable to me).

The Bad (a personal pet peave):

The over 15 "somehows" in this short book. I'm reading this book to find out what happened--don't "somehow" me. Your job as a writer is to explain the "somehow" somehow ;)

Franchise book#19
Second novel series #1

The sequel to Alien Resurrection that none of us asked for buy yet we still got and to be honest, it isn’t that bad of a book.

This gets a solid 3 stars - 3.5 would have been my choice if I could fraction-star things... :)

Basically the book has a bunch of the elements I want to find in an Aliens book/piece of media. These things are done (for me) fairly effectively. However, I found the cast too large to engage with, I constantly lost track of who was who, what their background stories were, and that took quite a lot of the tension out of it, as I often found I didn't care that much about character fates.

But I enjoyed it, had no problem getting to the end. So 3 stars it is.

SPOILERS
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Book is a sequel to the Alien: Resurrection film. I enjoyed having characters I already knew, with faces I already knew, in it - made a change from normal situation with Aliens books.

I would read a sequel to this book if there is one - but I don't know, and will just keep reading

I liked that we had lots of creeping around, wondering where the aliens would come from in the books. And I liked the location it mostly played in - a big greenhouse was a pretty spooky place to have crawling with Aliens.

I love the continuation of the Alien Resurrection crew. I love the setting of an orbital botany colony. After that there just isn’t much to like.

Tie-in novels don't often aim high, but most of them at least come with the satisfaction of a good story. This one in particular misses the mark, and although some of the blame is on the author, a lot of it is the general difficulty in writing outside stories in the ALIEN franchise.

Compare, for example, to more well-known franchise tie-ins, such as STAR TREK. Paramount operates an ongoing STAR TREK office and partners with editors at Pocket Books to ensure that TREK titles don't stray into territory that might be explored in canon, they don't allow story elements that could permanently impact the canon or be contradicted later, for the most part. Apparently there's not any similar apparatus at Fox with ALIEN franchise titles, since the book generally strays into all of these areas.

Friedman is a capable author, but the book seems like he was given a few directives to make a splash with this title--this was the first of Dark Horse's mass market ALIEN franchise novels, and they clearly wanted to debut with one starring Ripley, and exploring the background of the overall franchise. However, as anyone who's seen the ALIEN films can attest, there's not a lot of extra territory to explore with Ripley. Anything that happened before ALIEN is irrelevant to the overall storyline, and the character doesn't have significant lapses in time between any of the films. Friedman took the only opening left available, which is to set the story after ALIEN: RESURRECTION, and while it's nice to explore Winona Ryder's character Call further, other character holdovers from the film that appear in the novel are more uninteresting than anything else.

Each of the four ALIEN films explores a different genre genetically melded--like the alien xenomorph--to the host genre of science fiction. ALIEN was a horror film, ALIENS was a war film, ALIEN 3 was a prison film, and ALIEN: RESURRECTION was pure space opera. Joss Whedon was the screenwriter on the last of these, and introduced a character group that felt like an incomplete sketch for his later FIREFLY/SERENITY. I'm inclined to think that Friedman picked up on this same line of thinking for this novel. However, compare this to a more successful ALIEN franchise story such as Bissette/Dorman's ALIENS: TRIBES, and it's easy to see that tie in fiction for this franchise might be overall more successful staying away from the Ripley character and more within the heart of the Ridley Scott/James Cameron areas of the franchise.

More frustrating, Friedman explores the background of the franchise as a whole, and introduces an explanation in the novel (as promised on the cover copy) of why the aliens were there in the first place when the Nostromo found them in ALIEN. At this point, with Scott's PROMETHEUS, virtually all of this exploration is going to wind up well outside of what will now be official ALIEN universe canon. Again, this is frustrating, but I wonder if a better line of communication between Dark Horse and Fox might have stopped this from happening, particularly since the inclusion of this aspect of the plot doesn't really add much to the overall interest of the novel.

Don't think that the book is completely disappointing, however. The alien-infecting-the-colony aspect is pretty well done, and was actually the more interesting part of the novel. It's done with the right amount of buildup and even, surprisingly, with some humor. I wish that the novel had more focused on this area of the story and had been less driven to be an epic follow up to ALIEN: RESURRECTION, and that the editorial directive to explain the whole ALIEN universe wasn't really so big an aspect of the book. Friedman does the best he can to balance all of this, so I don't think he's to blame for the book's general iffy-ness. However, this does make me question whether reading other titles in Dark Horse's ALIEN novel line will be worth the effort.