Customer Reviews

Aliens: Criminal Enterprise (Aliens (Dark Horse))

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

My lifestyle determines my death style... This line from Metallica's `Frantic' song comes to mind now that I've finished reading Aliens: Criminal Enterprise by S.D. Perry.

Criminal Enterprise is the fifth Aliens based novel that has come out in the past couple of years, and it is one of the best offerings to date in my humble opinion.

This novel, even though it is set in the Aliens universe, is a story about base human desires and those who happen to cater to them.

People need escape from every day stress. Many of us get it from spending time with our loved ones, family, games, movies and television, and other means. And then there are those who use mind altering substances in order to escape what life throws at them.

Like anything, there is a danger of getting addicted. Even simple things like video games can be addictive, but let's face it; nothing is more dangerous than drugs.

Drugs, especially the illegal, mind -altering kind, can take a perfectly good man or woman and destroy their lives, turning them into petty criminals in order to get enough money for their next fix.

Of course, when you're talking drugs, there are those who create and distribute the drugs. The very dregs of society who are no better than insects themselves, parasites that live off the suffering of others.

The worst part about it is how often innocent people are hurt because of the dealings of both the users and the pushers.

Now, without giving away too much about the novel, it deals, as I stated above, with criminals. The novel is set on a tiny, barren, cold world called Fantasia. It is nothing more than a hideaway for a Earth bound drug lord, who uses its remoteness and seclusion in order to produce several different types of recreational drugs to be sold and distributed back on Earth, and I'm assuming other colony worlds.

Where the aliens come in is that they are nothing more than vicious guard dogs, ensuring that no one can attack the laboratory as no one could hope to get close enough before they were brought down, or captured to be used as hosts for the young.

Those who man the laboratory are either criminal themselves on the run from the law, or people who really don't care at all who they work for as long as the pay is good.

Of course, the fact that you're dealing with drug dealers, you have many of the other illicit activities that go hand in hand with it, such as gambling and prostitution.

All in all, it is nothing more than a - and pardon my usage of this term - wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Into this nest of vipers is thrust Tommy and Pete, brothers from Earth. Tommy is doing his best to live the life of a honest, law abiding citizen, and he's a commercial pilot. His younger brother Pete, however, is a criminal wannabe. Not a true criminal, just a hanger on who is forced to get his brother Tommy to help him do a run to Fantasia in order to save his life.

This novel doesn't pull its punches. It's a glimpse into the lives of criminals and all the darkness and deviations that one would expect from those who ply their trade breaking the law, and from those running from the law.

It's dark and it's not pretty. In fact, most of these people are only a few steps up the evolutionary ladder from pure animals.

Thus exactly why it was so good in my opinion.

Sure, the Aliens were nothing more than glorified watch dogs, but they played the role one would expect. You can't have these dangerous creatures without death, and it does come eventually.

Just remember that line from `Frantic'.

The only major spoiler I will give out here is that there are no forays into the hive, or hives, there are no face huggers or queens involved. But it doesn't really matter. The novel is a human story, one about the baser, darker sides of human nature, but at the same time it deals with family, and what you will do for your family.

In closing, drug dealers and criminal organizations are really no different than the aliens when it comes right down to it. Both are horrible parasites that need hosts, or victims, in order to survive and neither gives anything of use in return, except eventual death.

4 out of 5.

To begin let me confess that I'm unexplainably drawn to these ALIENS novels despite the fact that truly solid entries are few and far between. I came into Criminal Enterprise directly after finishing Diane Carey's DNA War and found this novel to be flawed but for very different reasons than the former.

I will begin by saying that SD Perry (daughter of longtime franchise contributor Steve Perry) definitely knows how to juggle a large cast. We meet literally dozens of human characters pretty early on and although a greater measure of separation would undoubtedly help the reader to identify the various groups involved in the plot, SD apparently had little trouble keeping track of the multiple crews she created.

The core of this tale follows an anti-heroic group of drug producing intergalactic scumbags working on a backwater planet called Fantasia. Yes there are Xenos present on the planet (called XTs here) but their role in this book serves as little more than glorified pit bulls. As others have accurately pointed out in their reviews, expect nothing in the way of the ALIEN lifestyle revealed here but rather a tale of human struggles in which the Xenomorph just so happen to pop up every now and then and carry a few individuals off.

This wouldn't be such a crime on its own had SD crafted a plot in which the reader actually cared about the fate of the humans involved. As it stands, however, she goes to great measure to paint a picture of humans who quite frankly get whatever they deserve. It is nearly impossible to feel an ounce of sympathy for any of the characters involved and since their trials and tribulations represent a solid 99% of the story content, that means a lot of wasted time.

About the greatest strength displayed by SD is her ability to integrate adult themes and rough language into her prose. While some may view this as a negative in its own right, at least her efforts result in painting a picture of a pretty scandalous group of individuals. Younger readers beware: the language here rivals even the roughest moments in any of the R-rated films and the sexual content far surpasses that.

All in all, SD Perry succeeds where Diane Carey fails (and vise versa) but neither of their recent entries can be considered literary classics by any stretch of the concept. In fact the ALIENS franchise itself, which has set a pretty low bar in the first place as far as books are concerned, benefits little by this effort.

I have read all of the Aliens books and I must say that this one is the best of the new series and well on par with the Earth Hive trilogy, my absolute favourite among the Aliens novells!

Many people have complained that this book lacks the classic aspects of facehuggers and queens and they are of course right. But instead you get far better, more fleshed out characters and a better laid out plot. And the story about using the Aliens as guard dogs is actually brilliant! I really appreciated the take on base security considering a possible Xeno-infestion. Perry has clearly been thinking long and hard about how you would go about designing a base to cope with Xenos.

To sum it up, I would say that this book is for those that are ready for a book that takes place IN the Aliens universe rather than solely focusing ON the aliens themselves.

If you are disturbed by sex and filth you should stay clear of this book, Perry is quite detailed about the more "intimate" aspects of some of the characters sex-life.

EDIT
A Wikipedia check-up of S.D. Perry shows that she is actually the daughter of Steve Perry, the author of "Aliens: Earthive". No wonder I liked this book so much =D

No eggs. No facehuggers. No chestbursters. No queens. No hives. Apparently it does not go without saying that the aliens should be the star of these stories. It's not that hard to figure out. Look at the cover of any book in this franchise. ALIENS. Notice how that text is at least twice as big as any other text. That's a clue.

The aliens are bit players in this story, relegated to the role of extremely vicious guard dogs. The stars of this story are PEOPLE. Tawdry PEOPLE with tawdry back stories. Please tell me more about these PEOPLE. I really want to know. Especially details about their sexual deviancies and oral sex skills. I need to know as many details as possible, because everyone survives and I'm looking forward to reading about them in the sequel. Not.

I HAVE READ SEVERAL OTHER BOOKS BY MS PERRY AND FOUND THAT THIS IS NOT ONE OF HER BEST. THE STORY IS VERY EASY TO FOLLOW AND IS VERY PREDICTABLE WITH A FEW TWISTS AND SURPRISES. THE CHARACTERS ARE PURELY FILTH. EITHER THEY ARE KILLERS, ADDICTS, WEIRDOS AND THE READER DOESN'T CARE ANYTHING ABOUT ANY OF THEM. THE MAIN CHARACTER TOMMY HAS THE PERSONALITY OF A GLASS OF WATER. THE STORY DOES HAVE IT'S SHARE OF ACTION AND I DID LIKE THE WHOLE IDEA OF USING ALIENS TO GUARD YOUR DRUG SMUGGLING BASE ON A REMOTE PLANET. IT IS NOT A BAD BOOK AND IT IS EASY TO READ. IF YOU LIKE ALIEN STORIES AND DON'T HAVE HIGH EXPECTATIONS THIS IS AN OK READ.

And so we come to the latest and so far, the last of the "Alien" novel published by Dark Horse, and this time, the novel, "Criminal Enterprise", is written by the established media and action writer S. D. Perry, and who is the first author in the revived series that has written in the Alien universe before. As she has had a higher ratio of hits than misses, it was a good bet that she would probably do a decent job this time around with the Aliens. "Criminal Enterprise" is without a doubt my favorite in this series. Now, regardless of what some fans may think, the Aliens are like zombies, being mindless as a whole, they are rather thin material to hang a long story onto. So, for them to work, they have to be part of a larger and more involved story, and Perry this time around manages to meld the science fiction action plot with the crime story, two of my favorite genres.

As "Criminal Enterprise" opens, Tommy Chase is on his way to the planet Fantasia to save his loser brother Pete again from another jam that Pete has gotten himself into.

This time though, there is a problem. Fantasia is a planet that is operating for the sole reason to be a headquarters for a crime cartel to cook up illegal drugs. Besides being populated a large number of people to cook up these illegal and highly addictive drugs, the cartel management has employed a large populace to fly shuttles, entertain the employees, and to be "security". In the end though, Fantasia is actually only one stronghold where everything is situated, and while management guards Fantasia's outer space parameter, a large populace of Aliens "guard" the planet itself. The trouble is that Fantasia's Aliens are typical Aliens in that any animal is prey, and these Aliens are only barely held in check by Fantasia's staff and technology. Also, anybody who breaks the rules of Fantasia gets to take a short walk to a nasty death outside with the cartel's head representative pets. This man, Trace Berdella, also likes to make a spectacle out of feeding the Aliens, as every couple of weeks he has a crew trot outside to hand feed cows to the bugs, always with the good chance that the crew won't get back to port.

When Tommy, along with a bunch of other newbies, arrive at Fantasia they are met by Berdella, his mistress Didi , and two of his main sycophants. Berdella's mistress and sex slave Didi is an artist, and held in thrall to Berdella and Fantasia by her drug habit. Berdella is in love with Didi, but he is also perversely in love with forcing her to pick out lovers and having them perform sex with him watching, and that is why Berdella and Didi are there, to pick out a new living sex toy to play with. Tommy meanwhile has a low opinion of those on Fantasia, Pete doesn't, and then things get tricky as both get friendly with Didi.

While Trace likes his fun and games, he is also a jealous and possessive man, and when Trace finds out Tommy and Pete's involvement with Didi, he decides to have the brothers go out on a beef run, a run he hopes they won't come back from.

Meanwhile, everything will quickly go to hell as somebody is betraying Fantasia and the cartel by helping a bunch of pirates get into the base and past its defenses, and this will mean fudging with Fantasia's defenses, and this action leads to, well . . .

"Criminal Enterprise" is a short, and quickly moving planet adventure that mixes crime, adventure, danger, monsters, science fiction, intrigue, villains, action, larger-than-life low-life people, mixed with a gritty working class sense of being; some of these people may be scum, but they easily recognizable and identifiable types and characters, and after all, they ARE just there doing a job. "Criminal Enterprise" wouldn't have been terribly out of place in one of the forties or fifties science fiction action pulps. This is not a novel that will cause the over-educated, sitting around in coffee houses, to have endless discussions about its subtext and literary palimpsests, but if you need something to sit down with that will give you a couple of hours of brisk solid and honest entertainment, and that will have you compulsively turning the pages to keep the action moving, then this is the Alien book to read. Stephen Youll gives us another in a long line of great covers that are poster worthy.

not a bad book about the seedy underworld of drug smuggling on a world called fantasia. drugs? aliens? why don't they make a movie with this book? would be way better than the new homogenized crap they turned both the aliens and predator series into.

When this book was released and S.D. Perry was the author, I was excited. This is the same S.D. Perry who co-authored `Female War' with her father, Steve Perry, then wrote `Berserker', and `Labyrinth'. Those first books set certain precedents regarding the universe. Subsequent authors have either chosen to follow those precedents or exercised literary license and not followed them. So it's befuddling when she chose not to follow the very precedents she helped establish!

One such precedent is knowledge of the aliens. We know from her work on `The Female War' that Earth fell to the aliens but was retaken. It should go without saying that this makes aliens fairly common knowledge. Yet in `Criminal Enterprise' this knowledge has somehow become arcane.

Another precedent is the toughness of the aliens themselves. It's established early on and throughout the franchise that the alien exoskeleton is essentially armor. Basic small arms such as handguns and shotguns merely bounce off the aliens. Even military-grade ammo requires direct hits, yet Tommy is able to take out an alien with a Glock handgun and the others employ Uzi submachineguns. Perhaps I'm to assume that these are futuristic Glocks and Uzis with special ammunition?

The breaks from precedents, while confusing, are mere annoyances when compared to other problems. As others have already pointed out, the aliens take a subordinate role rather than a starring one. A book in the alien franchise should actually feature the aliens! Using the aliens as a sort of lurking boogeyman is not satisfying.

Next is the subject matter itself. This is a novel about criminals and specifically drug makers/dealers. That's a pretty tough sell by itself..... But even the 'good' guys aren't ones I identified with. As a fledgling writer, I've had it beaten into me that I must create characters that the reader cares about. But going through the list of characters, I find myself barely caring about even the good guys. Pete is simply annoying. His brother Tommy is an automaton. There's actually an attempt at making a bond with the Kaye character with details of his motivation (loss of his son to drugs) but it fell short for me.

At $6.99 a pop, these writing failures are becoming expensive.

Throughout our novels/movies we have seen people attempt to use the alien in a variety of different roles. There were the people who took the Alien to Earth because they saw the weaponized potential of the beast. Even Birk, in aliens, thought the alien should be saved becaused it could have so many uses for humanity. From the chemicals omitted in Royal Jelly to the things a crew of these little workers could do, it is easy to spot their usefulness. So, when a crew decides to turn some profit by utilizing the Aliens as a watchdog for their drug operation, everyone seems to approve. Who would be stupid enough to mess with an Alien, they reason, not really thinking that they are someone that is stupid enough to use the beast. And then a calamity turns into another calamity, until the one beautiful plan looks like the layout to a bloodbath.

S.D. is one of the writers I trust when it comes to the aliens universe. When reading something you really want an author that knows their way around the material, and who can be better at thta that someone that helped create so much of it? Heck, when you look at it as a family enterprise, the blood in that family might melt through a ship or two as well.
Its a cool thought anyhow.

This is one reason I was happy to see this book out and was even happier to read it, because I knew the book would not be disappointing. Even the basic writing on the Alien is done with care by S.D., making me think they have a few little pet facehuggers at home. That esentially meant that the plot turned out to be a nice thing, and that I found something I liked. The idea of asking what was worse - the alien and the things it did or the people who put it there - is a great idea to tinker with. It is also a nice morality tale when you think that the Alien can't really help what it does and yet it is the villian when it comes down to what happens in these books.

S.D. does a great job here, I love saying that, and creates characters you can see and situations you can dread. This means that the alien has its place and the people do as well, only the people might not know just how far down their little bipedal bodies have slipped. Combine this with a good story, a nice plot, some twists, and the question of alien - hero or horror - and you have some nice reading.

Less about Aliens than a die-hard fan might want, but Criminal Enterprise is a great, down-and-dirty tale of future drug runners on a world overrun with the title creatures. While not great literature, Perry does deliver a quick, gritty crime drama set in the Aliens universe. I love her minimalized writing style and really enjoyed this novel. Again, might not be as much for fans of Aliens as it is for fans of Perry herself.