Just Finished Reading: Aliens Vs Predator - War by S D Perry (FP: 1999)

After joining a band of alien Hunters a year ago Machiko Noguchi has come to the conclusion that no matter how many Aliens she kills on the hunt, no matter how well she performs in the sparring room and no matter how well she follows the Hunters Code she will never be accepted, never be a Hunter in her own right. This becomes blindingly obvious when she is aggressively removed from a new Hunt and confined to the orbiting spaceship. Meanwhile a handful of refugees from an Alien infested space station land on the Company planet Bunda hoping that their nightmare has finally come to an end. Unfortunately for them the Company wants a file it thinks they possess, a file that shows that the Alien infection was deliberate, a file that shows just how effective an Alien infestation is when used against an unprotected target. Sending one of its heaviest ‘hitters’, a man on the make, the Company expects results fast no matter the cost to human lives. Caught between the Hunt, a loose Alien Queen and the Company goons the only question is who exactly is going to get them killed before they can get off an infected Bunda.

Written in a fairly effective way this rather sparse novel (at a mere 209 pages on of the shortest I’ve read in a while) moves along at a fair clip and turned out to be moderately entertaining. There are few surprises and I found myself thinking more than once that the author was rather lazily describing variations of scenes from the various Aliens and Predator movies rather than actually inventing anything herself. It has all the expected elements and all the usual suspects/characters. There’s precious little new here except hints of the Hunter culture and some whizzy human technology developed for bug control teams but that’s really it. There’s not a lot of depth here but plenty of action, blood and death to attempt to make up for that. Don’t expect to have your mind expanded but you should be moderately entertained for a few days if you’ve liked the movies at all. Disposable but generally OK fun.