Alien: Colony War, by David Barnett

  Alien: Colony War is a classical Alien story in the "Aliens / Predator / Prometheus Universe": state, corporate and military corruption and greed, individual bravery and struggle, xenomorphs and mothers willing to protect their children, the occasional psychopath. Entertaining. I feel the author understands and respects the Alien universe.

  Alien has a successful recipe, one that unlike other franchises, no one yet tried to deconstruct, reinvent or turn into something else. Yes, I am also talking about Alien: Earth, if you look into it, it's the same story. I am talking about a world filled with despondency: indentured human work, a cold corporate profit driven mentality in the ones holding most resources, a general callousness towards loss of human life, monstrous viscerally terrifying monsters. And in this world, there is the human (and sometime synthetic) individual spirit of survival, decency and bravery. And the feelings evoked by this kind of scenario are also pretty formulaic: a mother protecting her child most of the time, but sometimes just protecting their friends, or the memory of a loved one.

  If you look closer, you will see that any attempt to get rid of this, at least in movie form, has failed. Even when putting a strong women lead like in Prometheus or AVP movies, if all they fought for was mere survival, it didn't count. Brilliant acting by Michael Fassbender, but no one cared about a scientifically curious and totally amoral synth. Predators hunting xenos didn't excite anyone, either.

  I feel like David Barnett understands this deeply. Even if he is writing in an extended universe (see the Black Goo or even the Engineers) he just mentions it in passing and keeps to the tried and true: a colony where stranded people have to survive a xenomorph infestation intentionally started for political and economic reasons.

  It's not like the most brilliant book ever. It's a well written, light, easy to read, formulaic Alien story, but it's entertaining, makes you feel something and in the end forces you to consider if you want to read another in the universe or not.

  I am wondering, is Alien the next Star Trek? If multiple authors are willing (and are allowed) to write in this shared universe, with the understanding that an Alien story has to follow a certain template, thus combining the familiar with the creative, will this (or be allowed to) grow into a rich universe, full of interesting characters and subtle but deeply scouring satire of modern capitalism? When people will just be OK to create an episodic lower budget series focusing on the characters and the world and not on the gimmicks that make certain writers feel smarter than everybody else, will this become the next big scale science fiction franchise?

  Bottom line: entertaining and respectful new addition to the Alien universe. Maybe I will just have to read more in this vast universe that is growing under the floor and above the ceiling tiles of 2020s science-fiction.