Alien: Out of the Shadows

As someone who has been a voracious reader for more than 7 decades, I have had the pleasure of being transported to the far reaches of the universe, whether through the scientific study of astronomy, cosmology and quantum physics, as well as through the science fiction movies and books of star trek, Star Wars and even the creepy alien series.Though I have not read any science fiction novels lately, when I saw this 344-page paperback book, Alien: Out of the shadows: (An original novel based on the blockbuster Alien films) by Tim Libbon) on Amazon I decided to purchase it. As always, the delivery service was great.I had seen the all the alien series movies and even read the books, but I did not realize there were a whole series of science fiction stories based upon the alien film themes. I found this book to be an entertaining and interesting story involving the same creatures, who we just can’t seem to permanently kill. They just keep coming back like a bad dream that keeps haunting us forcing us to wake up.In any case, this story begins with a bang when minors in the caves digging for trimonite (supposed to be the hardest thing in the universe) find they are not alone, and their nightmare has begun as they discover there are indeed monsters. The start of chapter three Ellen Ripley enters this novel, and this is where things get frightening and more exciting. I always loved Ripley’s strong take charge personality when it comes to fighting these alien creatures.I never give away too much information when reviewing any novel but if you are a fan of the alien movies and books you should check out this novel.Rating: 4 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Season of the warrior: A poetic tribute to warriors).

I am a HUGE fan of the Alien Franchise, owning all four films and even the AVP movies (although not anywhere near as good as the original standalone canon) on Blu-ray. Not being much of a reader, I just happened upon these books and was intrigued by the plot summeries provided. I kept finding myself adding, then removing the trilogy from my cart over a period of a week. There have been plenty of products that other people have deemed lackluster or subpar, things that I think have no flaws whatsoever and have bought regardless of communal opinion, but since I had sort've let my interest in reading dwindle, I didn't want to spend money on something that I wasn't even sure would hold my attention and more importantly, intrigue and impress me. With that in mind, figuring I wasn't sure what I'd be getting, I decided not to get the entire set, but to start with Tim Lebbon's first lead in to the trilogy, Alien: Out of the Shadows. I won't skim the surface of the plot sequence or details about the characters and their roles in the story, as not to spoil or give away too much, but I will say, that I found the book to be quite a different formula than what the negative reviews had me believing before I decided to buy it. If you take the time to browse a few 3 star and lower ones, most would agree that it was slow, confused and off course, losing topic in some parts and picking back up later in others. I didn't get that sense whatsoever. I felt like it built from a certain concept and kept adding to it, driving itself along just perfectly. The plot and directives were clear and the chronology of events made perfect sense. I found the read full of twists and turns and tons of 'what's going to happen nexts'. Sure, it wasn't all action all the time, but that's the beauty of it, the suspense of it all. The formula is very well done, so that even if there's not some insanely dramatic action sequence befalling the characters, you're still forced to read on, page by page, pulled in, curious to know what's gonna be waiting at each new turn. Never once did I find myself lost or bored. Key, considering several reviews complained that character deaths were askew and confusing, blink-and-you-missed-it moments. Maybe I was just so intrigued as not to afford to miss them, but I am certain that it plainly tells you exactly who is dead, dying or succumb to vicious and tragic attack. The only thing I can lend to the character confusion in a negative sense is that they aren't really described all that much in terms of physical appearance and demeanor. I found myself having a mental image of characters in the book, finding it hard to change it as I read on, once a simple and vague detail on their appearance finally did appear. I'm not sure if the author's intent was to let the reader build the character in their mind, maybe to create a sense of connection based on how the mind chose to perceive them. Whatever the reason or whether there was one, it is hardly something to be upset about. The characters are distinguishable and written so that you know who is doing what and when. All and all if that is the book's one and only flaw, and not even a flaw at all, if you ask me, then it may as well be counted pretty close to perfect. I thought it held true to the feel and atmosphere of both the creature and the mythos surrounding the franchise. I could see it easily adapted into a film. The ending was a surprise and creative, as a last point. To put it plainly, if you are a fan of the Alien films and their universe in any regard, pick this one up. I was wholly impressed and intrigued start to finish and will be completing this trilogy very soon. I am also looking into the other novel sets and series as well, because of this book!

If you're not a fan of, as in a fanatic about, the Alien franchise, all you need to know is Out of the Shadows is pretty mixed bag: the plot structure is obligatory, the dialog is mostly solid, the imagery is fairly uninspired, the action is sometimes confusing but more often exciting, the original characters are largely forgettable, and so on. I think the book's biggest weakness is underdeveloped thematics: there are some very interesting themes at play, like memory and delusion, but Lebbon skates around them at best. It's a reliable mass market paper back sci fi/horror read.But if you are a fan of the Alien franchise, what you probably want to know is can this book possibly matter.Let me clarify straightaway that asking "can this book matter?" is for me not a question of canon. Indeed, the marketing around this book is evidence that what matters to canon changes. This is a novel (published in 2014) about what happened to Ellen Ripley between the events of the justly-beloved Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) films. My question is, given that Aliens purports to already account for that time, can Out of the Shadows matter narratively speaking? I think so: although Ripley has a self-contained arc in each of the films, her character is significantly different as between them. Nothing in the first film, not even her trauma-addled rescue of Jonesy, can account for her empowered maternalism in the second one. That's where this story becomes relevant.Inspired by a deleted scene from Aliens, where Burke and Ripley discuss Ripley's daughter Amanda, Lebbon thoroughly if somewhat repetitively characterizes Ripley's intense feelings of maternal guilt. Although any reader who has seen Aliens already knows that Ripley will not remember the events in Out of the Shadows, Lebbon's characterization emotionally primes Ripley to make the intense mother-daughter connection with Newt that we see in that film. Specifically, Out of the Shadows made me realize that, on the basis of the films alone, Ripley could have rejected Newt with just as much psychological plausibility. Why did she instead adopt her? Now, none of this is to say that Ripley's arc in Aliens is not sufficient in itself; rather, Lebbon's story simply helps to bridge the gap between it and her arc in Alien.Lebbon creates a co-protagonist, Chris "Hoop" Hooper, to help flesh out this theme. Hoop also left his family behind to work in space, but unlike Ripley he initially has no desire to get back to them. Hoop is competent but bland; his ambivalence is transparently a result of Lebbon's need to mediate Ripley's gravitas as a pop culture icon. Even so, it's a shame to spend so many pages with such a boring character. Aside from Ripley, Hoop is the most well-developed character but that's not saying much. Perhaps taking a cue from both Alien and Aliens, Lebbon only lightly sketches out the rest of the cast, which allows us to read into them -- or not -- as we prefer. They are mostly there as horror-fodder anyway but Lebbon does skillfully manage moments of authentic pathos amid the carnage, just like in the films.Which leads to another aspect of why Out of the Shadows matters: Alien and Aliens are very different in terms of the pace of the action, especially as a function of Ripley's character. The woman who sings to herself in the Narcissus is very different from the woman who brings herself to go back to LV426. Lebbon strikes a balance between reactive horror tropes and proactive action adventure tropes. This is not just a given for Lebbon, as if his book is part of some middle ground genre, but a matter of explicit character development. I was very impressed by this, especially in the chapter aptly entitled "Majesty." Ripley's immortal, badass line "Get away from her, you bitch!" punches even harder after reading Out of the Shadows.

Well! That was a bumpy ride. Right from the beginning Tim Lebbon racked up the tension relentlessly. It's the first time I've neared the end of a Book and found myself wanting to flick to the very end to see how everything turned out simply because the anticipation, the tension, was too much. I cannot remember an author ever making me want to do that. But I didn't. I hung on in to the end (whether or not it was bitter remains for other readers to discover for themselves).I think you need to at least have watched the movie Alien (1979) to really appreciate this Book which is set, in time, between the end of Alien and the beginning of the movie, Aliens (1986). Ellen Ripley (of the movie) plays a key role in Lebbon's Book but the main protagonist is Chris Hooper. Our very favourite aliens, the jaw-dropping, acid-bleeding nightmares, are back causing problems.There is plenty of violence in this and occasionally it is graphic. Mostly it is just plain tense. Some strange language but that is to be expected in a novel of this nature. I'd cuss too if one of those critters was coming at me.I think the Book deserves 5 stars despite occasional implausibilities (even for a scifi) and I didn't care much for the insertion of several of Ellen Ripley's uneasy dreams about her daughter. I found them somewhat distracting at times.I like Lebbon's writing style. He writes simply without his choice of language being over simple, and without talking over the head of his readers. You would need to pay attention to the details of the spaceship and other scientific elements of the story to see in your mind's eye what is happening. It's doable. Alien: Out of the Shadows is certainly not as challenging a reading as The Martian by Andy Weir (a brilliant novel which requires some scientific understanding or research to appreciate it fully.I first became aware of Tim Lebbon when I read his Book 30 Days of Night, based on the vampire movie of the same name. Lebbon often writes Books based on movies, and I like that.

An ok read. It makes you think about what could have happened to Ripley in those 57 years between Alien and Aliens. However, I didn’t feel it really fitted that well in to the story depicted in the films. And, despite it being a stand alone book to bridge the gap (that I didn’t think was really there) between the two films, the characters within the pages of the book seem to mirror people in Alien and Aliens. Now that was a bit “off” I think, as the people in Alien are . . . (sorry - spoiler alert for those who have never seen the Alien films) . . . Dead, therefore people in the book, being different people to those in the film, probably would not use the same slang terms or even the exact terms used within the films as those deceased - unless they are family or close friends of those in the films I guess. I suppose I just felt that the copying of lines from the films was a bit tacky. But, if you love the Alien series, then this is worth a read, if only to hear about Ellen Ripley and the pesky xenomorphs some more. Maybe another title for another book there - Ellen Ripley and her Alien Adventures in LV426

Its a competently written thriller fitting into the Alien saga between Aliens and Aliens. It's better than I thought it would be and for people looking for more of the same from the films it does that job well. This also goes for the two sequels Sea of Sorrows and River of Pain. How it fits in between Alien and Aliens is somewhat contrived but those are the constraints the author had to work with.A good read for fans of the films. Frankly it's better than the AVP storyline.

Set between the events of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), the deep space mining vessel Marion oversees the extraction of trimonite, the hardest and rarest material yet known, from the otherwise wasted planet, LV178. Chris 'Hoop' Hooper is the ship's head engineer and has much on his mind, not least of which is his self-enforced estrangement from his wife and children. All of this quickly takes second place, as two drop ships full of miners that have been out of contact for a couple of days suddenly return. Only one is able to contact the Marion and what they have to say (and show) is inexplicable and terrifying. The miners found something down on LV178 and it has attacked and killed most of the miners, and has also boarded the drop-ships. Panic and fear descend and one shuttle crashes into the bigger vessel, casing irreparable damage and sending them into a downward spiral to the planet. The other manages to land, but has brought with it something from the darkest nightmares.Into this mix, comes an escape pod, automatically following the Marion's distress call. Inside, in stasis, is the one person who has met this nightmare before and survived. It is Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo...As a huge fan of the Alien films, certainly the first three anyway, I've always tended to avoid novelisations and books based on and in the universe. To be honest, I do this with most of the things I like. It's not that I think they'll be bad, it's just that I'm generally content with the films as the defining medium for the franchise/series. However, when I discovered that Tim Lebbon (who wrote the near perfect Coldbrook) had written an Alien novel set between films one and two, I pretty much had to check it out. Coldbrook was an excellent and fast paced read, so I knew Tim's writing would be reliable. As for the story...I think, with this kind of franchise, with an officially sanctioned new novel set in the Alien universe, there's going to be a lot of constraints, a lot of back and forth between the writer and the company that owns the product. There must be a lot of things that are off limits, a lot of details to be hammered out before both sides are happy with the story. Add to that, the amount of detail from the films and previously published books that may or may not be 'cannon' and you have a lot of 'history' to contend with. So, it's not without a serious amount of relief that Tim pulls off what feels like an authentic entry in the Alien saga. In fact, perhaps a tiny negative is the probability that in order to fully enjoy this book, you will need to know what happened in the film Alien. Of course, it's highly unlikely that someone unfamiliar with the franchise would pick up this book. Speaking of which, very sporadically peppered through the book, there appear to be references to both the Alien films and other SF classics. I spotted what I'm sure were a few lines of dialogue (or similar) from the films, and also what seemed to be genre nods to Predator and Bladerunner... I could be wrong, though.The action is frenetic and begins almost immediately. Most of what we see unfolds from the third person narrative of Hoop. It is he who is present when the contact with the drop-ships is re-established, and he who takes command of the ship when the Captain is killed in the initial crashes. From there, we have aliens quarantined in the surviving drop-ship, while the action jumps forward a few weeks as the survivors wait in vain hope of someone responding to their distress call. There is a response, but it turns out to be a life-boat containing one person in stasis. That person is Ellen Ripley, who is awoken thirty some years after she blew up the Nostromo and destroyed 'her' alien. Now, somehow, she has been brought to the Marion and the nightmare looks set to begin again.The tone of the book, to me, more closely resembles the second film, mostly due to the fast-paced action and the makeshift weaponry (no pulse rifles or smart-guns - instead we have welding tools, demolition charges and other tools press-ganged into killing weapons), and also the pace of the narrative. There is the initial alien attack when the group lifts the imposed quarantine on the last drop-ship and the monsters come barrelling out; there is the inevitable trip down to the surface of LV178 to where the initial outbreak began; and then a race/chase through the mines, complete with fantastic, overwhelming and terrifying discoveries there. There a few quieter moments, but the overall feeling is one of haste, forced by outside influence and otherwise. Ripley struggles with nightmares concerning her daughter, lost to her in time and space, any respite from the alien threat is always tainted by their inevitable appearance. It's great stuff.There is a neat explanation as to why the escape ship from the Nostromo travelled so far in space before being rescued, but I don't want to spoil the surprises... I was also aware that throughout my reading, I was constantly wondering how Tim was going to resolve the memory issue with Ripley - i.e. why in Aliens, does she not remember this episode. Well, my imagination ran riot with thoughts of alternate universes, clones and the like. The actual explanation is well realised, and works in the context of the story...although I think I'd have preferred it, if it had come about slightly differently, in a more...malicious way...but again, you'll have to read the book to find out both how and what I mean...All in all, it's a great read and if it's slightly lacking in depth (I think this is inevitable, considering the constraints of the franchise), it more than makes up for in atmosphere, setting and pace. Very good addition to the alien series and guess what? There's another two to come, the next by James A. Moore and the third and final in the trilogy by Christopher Golden. Really looking forward to seeing where both writers take the story...

Set after the events of the first Alien movie and book (Alien by Alan Dean Foster), Alien: Out of the Shadows chronicles Ripley docking onto deep mining vessel, Marion, her arrival comes after the miners find aliens on the surface of the planet LV178. Thrust yet again into the do or die situation of thwarting the aliens, Ripley brings her previous experience to help the remaining crew of the Marion.I am a huge fan of the movie franchise and read Alien by Alan Dean Foster some twenty years ago, but have never read any other interpretations of the franchise by different authors and although the feel of the book was in keeping with the mercenary and disseminated future painted in the original films, thirty-seven years on Ripley doesn't quite seem the same. In fact one of the things that disappointed me about this fan fiction was that Ripley isn't the one who saves the day.The way this story is written it easily slots in between Alien and Aliens, however I enjoy the franchise as much as I do because there are so few straight-talking and logical female action heroines and although Ripley has help in all the films of the franchise, in this novel she lacks the strong survival instinct I come to relate to her.