Earth Hive: Aliens Book I: Earth Hive Book 1 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The characters are pretty well developed, and there is a good reason for the stock character marines for being so stock. There also some nicely done hints as to the reason laced through the book until the reason is revealed in a rather forceful way.

There are a few things that could have been done better though. There seemed to be an excessive amount of cussing, but in between that, the narcotic vending machines, and the discussion of pleasure droids, it adds to the feeling that society has degraded in the future. It's a bit of a mystery how they pinpointed the "homeworld" of the aliens, especially since it obviously is a different planet from the Hiveworld in Female War. The non-xenomorph alien that pops in is also kind of a mystery, but then again it might be the species the ruined space space ship from Alien belonged to, in which case it's a nice way to tie in the first movie. And the ability of a drone to have changed into a queen seems contrary to what speculation into the movies has come up with, that even without an ovipositer an alien has a limited egg laying ability to lay a queen-baring face hugger egg along with one or two normal eggs.

But these problems are pretty minimal and don't hinder the answer the book provides to another question: What would happen if some of the aliens were free on Earth?

Ok, just to clear up a little confusion. The reason the characters Billie and Wilks seem so similiar to Newt and Hicks is because they are the same characters. This novel was adapted from a series of Dark Horse comics that came out before Newt and Hicks were killed off in Alien 3. Obviously this posed a problem when they decided to release this novel in '92. So basically they just changed the names and left the story alone. So to all the people who think the characthers in this book are unoriginal, think again. This was originally a continuation of Newt and Hicks from Aliens.

The cover of this book is really cool; it's what led me to pick it up in the first place. Unfortunately, it's the best part of the book. As soon as you open the novel, you see that this is not Steve Perry in his best form. He constantly plugs in commas where semi-colons would be much more appropriate, and neglects to put commas where they should be, which makes many sentences read quite awkwardly. He uses very short paragraphs, often jumping from thing to thing without really going into them. This book could've gotten another star just for being well-edited.

The backstory of the characters is exactly the same as the story of Aliens -- a squad of Colonial marines goes to Rim to investigate something, finds the aliens, nukes the colony (it's the only way to be sure), and there are only 2 survivors -- a marine corporal and a civilian girl. Turns out, thought, that the girls parents started the alien problem when they discovered a giant, horseshoe shaped derelict spacecraft and went to investigate...sound familiar?

Also, this book spans nearly three years, most of it at the end. There are a ton of characters, multiple plotlines evolving at once. It's just too short. With another hundred or two pages, we could've gotten to know the characters, instead of just observing their actions; the neatest sequence in the book, the alien takeover, could've been shown in a lot more depth.

Overall, this story is a semi-entertaining, somewhat well-written contribution to the Aliens saga, but it could've been much better.