Customer Reviews

Aliens: No Exit (Aliens (Dark Horse))

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love the Alien universe, and I always look at the bookstore for the newest books on it. So I saw a new book called Aliens: New Exit, and grabbed it up without any idea what it was about. The cover art looked promising, though.
I found it to be fun. There were three things that drove me crazy, though: firstly, the author always called the creatures Aliens, capital A. No one calls them that, people! They are refered to as generally by things, militarily by xenomorphs, and religiously as demons. Or simply aliens, not Aliens. The reader can call them Aliens, but never can the characters.
Secondly, I thought it was stupid the Aliens were known of publically. The feel in the films is that Weyland-Yutani will quiet it all, hush-hush, all witnesses killed. Now everyone knows about them!
Lastly, the characters were kind of stereotypical, especially Bjorn. I liked him a lot, all the same.
Overrall, it was enjoyable, but if you see it and, say, Steel Egg, Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, and The Female War, this should be last on your priority list in my opinion.

This story is a bit different than most of the Aliens stories you run across because it approaches things differently. aliens are not the threat they were when the books first started out, but they are no lightweights that can be kicked around like some empty soda can. No, people have adapted to them and have learned to fight them, and people have also learned to leave the beasties alone. Along with this are the companies that make money because there are Aliens - and these companies are getting bigger because people are learning more every day. Now imagine you went to sleep 30 years ago, when the Aliens were a horror, and woke into this company-ran world. you would not only be surprised but you would also be happy. Or would you be happy? I guess that depends on who you are and what you know - and the person we follow here knows a little too much. He has a secret, a few of them to be truthful, and those secrets could not only hurt some companies but could also cripple much of the goodwill that has been built between companies and people. So, what would a company do? Well, it is pretty, has an inner mouth, asnd doesn't like its food to not scream before it eats it.

While this book has had mixed receptions, I thought it was a good creation because it worked off an interesting premise. Things had fallen into the hands of the humans, companies knew how to control the worlds a bit better, and they used the Alien as something to make profit off of. I also like the human we follow around - if anyone has had a hand in blowing holes in company you see that person here. Sure, ripley was a powerhouse but ripley had seen first contact and LV-426. This secret, while perhaps not so horrible, is still a big no-no in the "good" and "evil" pamplet that the companies may just skim.

So, will you like this? an alien fan would like the read but someone else might want to do a little checking first. I personally liked it and would gie it a 5 if it didn't have a lot of minor problems - still, it did have its minor glitches. The devil is here, the devil is there, the devil is mrore human than people care.
Aliens are instinctually what they are, after all, but humans - humans are different. Ask the main character of this book; he can tell you what humans are like.

The overall story here is good and the writing is solid. Lots of action, good dialogue and narrative, likable characters, and the backstory of the main character was really outstanding. I would have given it four stars, but there were a couple of points that really bugged me.

**SPOILER ALERTS**

I assume the ending was a cliffhanger for another book, but I hated how abrupt it was.

Also, I simply can't understand why "The Company" staged a fake alien infestation, only to have to elaborately kill the inspectors who would quickly figure out that it was staged. Why not create a real infestation? The inspectors would have verified that the infestation was real, and Weyland-Yutani would have been guaranteed to have caused a stock-price panic for their competitor. Weyland-Yutani had access to aliens (they had their own farm planet) and they didn't seem too concerned of containment because they brought the aliens to the planet just to kill the inspectors. This just seemed like a big plot point that didn't make a lot of sense.

If you are looking for a great story line, this one has the best in the series. Suspense, tension, likeable characters, couldn't put the book down.

First off i love this author, The way he gets you into the characters and the way he writes. This book was great it kept me up alot of nights. The only problem is it is a little short but it is no big deal the best part about the book is it has like a crime scene investigation going on in alien form :) i really reccomend this book to Scifi and alien fans.

This book had surprisingly very little action with the aliens themselves. The book was more about the Company and the people that work for it. The main antagonist Braley is definitely one of the nastiest characters in any of the aliens books that I have read.

The heroes of the book certainly are an interesting bunch who could support a series if they were given more depth and background. There is definitely room in the aliens genre for more interaction with the company on a higher level, as most of the books out there are deal mainly with one evil scientist or military commander.

While working for the Weyland-Yutani corporation Detective Anders Kramm comes home from work and finds that his house has been contaminated by aliens. Ironic considering that his job is to hunt them down. This leads to the destruction of his world. He tracks down the aliens and destroys them and in the process he is deeply scarred, both physically and mentally. Unable to live with what has happened to him and his family, and blacklisted by Weyland-Yutani, for calling in the authorities after his family is murdered. Kramm eventually has himself cryogenically frozen, to escape his memories, and to be revived in the future if he is needed.

And he will be needed. Thirty years after his family's death he is revived by Matthew Darby of the Planetus Corporation. It seems that Planetus and Weyland-Yutani have ended up owning the same planet (C-3 L/M) and there is a problem. It seems that W-Y has been acting "suspicious" in their terra-forming operations. Have they invented a new terra-forming piece of machinery or not, and what is the mystery behind the mass killing at one of the terra-forming stations.

W-Y seems to be trying to sweep the events behind the killings under the rug, but Planetus wants the incident investigated further, and they want Kramm to do the investigating. It seems that Kramm is the closest thing to an expert that Planetus can get a hold of. He is asked to investigate, he accepts, and so he is shipped to C-3 L/M where he meets his company contact Francis Stauff. He also meets the W-Y representative, the creepy Charles Braley, a man who would give a pedophile the willies, and who is hiding behind a hologram. The animosity between Stauff and Braley is purely palpable.

After seeing the crime scene, Kramm is forced to give a preliminary report of accidental death, only he knows it wasn't, but he also know that it wasn't Aliens that killed the stations techs. Then it turns out that one of the techies was a Planetus spy, and he had had an ocular camera implanted to record everything that he saw at the station. And one of the things that he recorded was the mass dying at W-Y's station.

Then the crap hits the fan as they realize that W-Y is on to them. Stauff and Kramm decide to book for Planetus' home planet, they also decide to take the three techs and two marines that were with them at the W-Y terra-forming station. As they leave they find out that the ship has been sabotaged and their new destination is the same planet where Kramm's family died.

Evenson gives us some real good stuff in this novel. The story moves along quickly, we are never bored, and he seems to know his way around the Alien mythos. The mystery as to what happened on C-3 L/M, and where do the aliens come into all of this is very well done, even the action and sense of setting on Kramm's home planet is well done. As a whole, if this novel had appeared in an old forties pulp called "Super Science Alien Stories", this would have been a good issue.

Still, there some really disappointing stuff here too. The first is the characterizations of most of the rest of the cast other than Kramm. They are either clichés, like Braley, or they are such non-entities that they'd have to work at it to be as deep as a mud puddle, again typical pulp novel stuff. Both sides of this can be seen when we look at the two space marines, one is a big, likable, clichéd lug, and the other is his wife, who is brighter, more articulate, and who is regulated to the position of being nothing more than textual furniture. In this age of bad-girl fighting machines, I would expect better from and experienced writer like Evenson.

The worst thing about the novel is the "ending" to "No Exit". It isn't so much abrupt, as it is just plain non-existent. Just as there is going to be the big confrontation between Kramm's remaining group, and W-Y, Evenson just packs his bags and goes home. "No Exit" reads as its last fifty pages or so has been removed from the novel's contents. This novel is clearly in need of a sequel, which I suspect we will never see, and which would probably not have anything to do with the xenomorphs anyway. This is sloppy plotting, although I wonder if this is because "they", who ever "they" are, wouldn't let Evenson finish it, or because he had ran out his word limit, or had just plain ran out the clock and the deadline was approaching. Whatever, the non-ending ending is just plain awful.

There is another thing that some will hate, but which didn't bother me. This is that the Aliens themselves don't even show up until the 144th page, fully halfway through the novel, and after an initial fight, they disappear again for another fifty pages or so. Yeah, "No Exit" is a pretty good corporate crime, murder mystery for the most part, but it does too little with the aliens for most bug fans.

And there is that lame non-ending ending.

I wanted to give this novel four stars, but the shallow characterization, and that there is no resolution to the novel's story just sinks this novel to three stars. And it's painful, this tie-in could have been so much better.

B. K. Everson is really horror author Brian Everson, and again, this tie-in novel has a poster worthy cover by Stephen Youll, which illustrates an attack on Francis. The really was the last Aliens novel to be published by Dark Horse, not Criminal Enterprise, which I erroneously thought was the last Aliens novel and when I reviewed that novel.

Previous novels in this series, all of which I have reviewed, in order, were Aliens: Original Sin Volume 1 (v. 1) by Michael Jan Friedman, Aliens: DNA War (Aliens (Dark Horse)) by Diane Carey, Aliens: Cauldron by Diane Carey, Aliens: Steel Egg (Aliens (Dark Horse)) by John Shirley, and Aliens: Criminal Enterprise by S. D. Perry, in that order.

This book is so bad I felt compelled to log in just to warn people. Its only point seems to be to describe how to become numb to horror.

Great character delineation. It has a quest ending, but you're sure the next one in the series will only get one step closer to punishing the bad corporation(s); and on and on. Pointless.