Tim Lebbon, Alien: Out Of The Shadows (2014)

The cover-stress on novelty here ('an original novel'; 'official new novel'; my copy came with a little silver sticker declaring 'All New Story') bends the truth a little, without fracturing it entirely. But that's OK: we understand the drill. To put it more precisely, the sjuzhet here is new, or new-ish, though the fabula is as old as Dan O'Bannon's 1970s screenplay, and I daresay as old as Beowulf and Gilgamesh.* Indeed, come to think of it: even the sjuzhet is rather second-hand. There's a mining spaceship operated by a varied crew; Ripley joins them; they land on a planet and go underground (in this case, into a mine to get some magic fuel); uh-oh, there are Aliens™ down there! Tension; gore; hard-bitten dialogue; tension; gore. Ash, the Ian-Holm, android turns up. Ripley survives. Done. That Ripley survives is no spoiler, for the story is set between Alien and the sequel movie Aliens. So the reader does not doubt Ripley's immunity; only how it is that she didn't remember anything to do with the adventure on awakening. But Lebbon explains that, too.

Now Lebbon-the-writer is a pro, and his aliens ('Lebbalien'?) are efficiently drawn and effective. The cast of characters get deftly sketched-in at the beginning, so that we care just enough when they start getting picked off. In other words: this title does exactly what it says on the Franchise-branded tin, and does it with considerable technical competence. There are occasional head-scratching moments, mind you. One is the nature of the mine. 'Trimonite was the hardest, strongest material known to man, and when a seam as rich as this one was found, it paid to mine it out.' Mine it out with drill-bits and hammers made of a substance even harder and stronger than Trimonite, presumably. But look: nitpicking isn't the frame-of-mind in which to approach a novel like this. You already know whether it's the kind of book you'd be interested in reading.

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* Note: I was going to add a gag to the effect that 'Beowulf and Gilgamesh' sounds like a heroic crime-fighting buddy duo: 'Fighting Crime -- the Old Fashioned Way!' But, on reflection, I'm not sure they do sound like a buddy-buddy cop movie pairing. And thinking a little more about this, it occurs to me: buddy-buddy cop duos need to have a certain metrical pattern to their linked names: specifically, quartus paeon, 'short-short-short-long'. Starsky and Hutch. Tango and Cash. Turner and Hooch. Hickey and Boggs. It works in other areas too: Morecambe and Wise, Watson and Crick, Oryx and Crake. Beethoven's Fifth ... duh-duh-duh-duhhhmm! I don't know why. But this is by-the-bye, except to note that were Tim Lebbon and Ridley Scott to team up and fight crime, they could go by the joint-moniker 'Lebbon and Scott' which would work just fine.