Alien: Sea Of Sorrows, Novel 2 in the Alien tie-In series, picks up about 100 years after the third Alien movie. Ellen Ripley is still dead (though there is no mention of her clone) and the company she had worked for, Weyland-Yutani, is still looking to cash in on any alien creatures that their various operations may encounter.
On the planet, LV178, Alan Decker, a descendant of Ripley, is working as an engineer in an attempt to terraform the planet. The company has already built three cities on LV178 (one of which is named Rutledge) and is working on many more. But Decker and crew have run into a problem. They’ve discovered some type of black sand with strange tubes poking out of its surface, and this sand is not at all conducive for developing. Investigating the tubes, they find tunnels, indicating that the planet has been mined before. In one of these tunnels they find a spaceship.
The company assembles a crew of mercenaries to investigate the spaceship, taking Decker along with them. Decker it seems has empathic abilities; he can read the emotions of people around him. In short time, we find out that Decker can also feel the emotions of another type of creature, the xenomorphs, the creatures that Ripley battled in the past. Into the tunnel they all go, and if you’re familiar with the series, you know what happens next. As it turns out, the xenomorphs have a limited empathic ability also; they can home onto Decker with ease. And, they are awfully pissed off when they discover that he’s related to the woman who destroyed so many of their kind in the past.
You might think, because of the constraints of the plot line, that an author tackling this tie-in might have been stifled when it came to creativity and putting his own stamp on the work. The beauty of Alien: Sea Of Sorrows proves just the opposite. Moore has not only managed to be wildly imaginative when serving up the familiar, but he has managed to make the narrative exciting as hell. If you had to make a comparison to the movies, Moore has taken the best elements of the second release, Aliens, and served them along with two of his strongest traits – excellent characterization and violent action scenes. Readers will be leaving deep finger impressions on the pages of their paper books or dents in their e-readers when they get to the meat of this novel, the narrative is that riveting. Alien: Sea Of Sorrows is highly recommended.
- Inflictions - April 11, 2015
- The Equinox - April 2, 2015
- The Nightmare Girl - March 9, 2015
- Intruder - February 12, 2015
- The Only Red Is Blood - February 12, 2015
- Insanity Tales - February 3, 2015
- Qualia Nous - January 28, 2015
- Once Upon An Apocalypse - November 25, 2014
- The Janus Demon - November 17, 2014
- Case White - November 7, 2014
