Alien: Romulus trailer–While you’re waiting for the movie, read this great 3-for-1

At last the first look at the next Alien franchise movie coming your way this summer–the trailer for Alien: Romulus is here! Check it out below. From director Fede Alverez with suspenseful music courtesy of one of our favorite composers, Benjamin Wallfisch, the latest cinematic installment (film #7) celebrates the 45th anniversary of Alien, and will take place between that film and its first sequel, Aliens. A group of young people encounter Zenomorphs on another distant world… which sounds familiar. Game over, man! Game over! The film stars Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim: Uprising) as Rain Carradine, Isabela Merced (Transformers: The Last Knight) as Kay, Murder is Easy star David Jonsson as Andy, plus Archie Renaux, Spike Feam, and Aileen Wu. The official poster is out, too:

While you’re waiting for Alien: Romulus, Titan Books has released its next 3-for-1 omnibus of Alien novels following Alien: The Shadow Archive (reviewed here): The Complete Alien Collection: Symphony of Death (available now here at Amazon).

Last year I reviewed both Alien: Enemy of My Enemy (here) and Aliens: Bishop (here), two novels I’d put at the top of a decade of great tie-in novels. Before last year I would have put at the very top Tim Lebbon’s Alien: Out of the Shadows (reviewed here), a fantastic journey featuring Ellen Ripley, and like the new Alien: Romulus it bridges the first two Alien movies. A close runner-up to that book also packed with excitement, sci-fi, and horror, is Tim Waggoner’s Alien: Prototype. You’ll find it and more in the new collection.

Three tough-as-nails female characters drive Alien: Prototype. Readers first meet Tamar Prather, a master of corporate espionage and all-around resourceful spy. Tamar is self-driven and self-serving, and she breaks into Weyland-Yutani to steal a stasis pod housing a valuable trade secret, with a buyer at an opposing corporation ready and waiting. Several hundred colonists live in the testing facility on the planet Jericho-3, and they’re about to meet a threat even worse than your typical Xenomorph encounter. To protect them is Zula Hendricks (first introduced in the Aliens: Defiance comic series), a member of the security staff who has been training her squad for just this kind of alien encounter.

Hendricks knows first-hand what works and what doesn’t in combat, having lost her last platoon from her own bad judgment. Working for the new corporation is a new take on the franchise’s synthetics, an upgraded cyborg named Brigette, and Hendricks’ synth friend Davis, now assisting her but no longer in your typical synth bipedal form. Some Frankensteinian efforts combined with that colonial marines action from Aliens, All You Need is Kill/Edge of Tomorrow, and Starship Troopers, and more of what makes Alien… Alien: those weasely, dastardly, bastardly Burke/Paul Reiser types that ultimately teach us not to fool with mother nature–it all spells good sci-fi reading.

The Complete Alien Collection: Symphony of Death also features two novels by Alex White, Alien: The Cold Forge (first reviewed here) and Alien: Into Charybdis (reviewed here). No book or film has portrayed the people behind the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as more vile and despicable as author Alex White has envisioned them in Alien: The Cold Forge, a sequel to Aliens. The Company is proceeding to fulfill one of its initial ideas, to weaponize the Xenomorphs for military use. Alien: The Cold Forge is Aliens as if written by Michael Crichton, a blend of Congo and Jurassic Park with aspects of the modern Planet of the Apes trilogy tie-ins and Project X. Never before in the Alien stories will readers want to see a corporate rep get his just desserts as the brutal, psychopathic corporate exec Dorian Sudler, embarking on a resource slashing audit of the experimental science station RB-323. A dying woman must carry out her own secret gene research project among the layers of secret projects within Weyland-Yutani–if she is to survive. Exciting? Yes. Suspenseful? Definitely. Readers will also learn the true name of the Xenomorphs, and encounter an entirely new use of the Weyland-Yutani borgs (like Bishop and David) that we haven’t seen before.

Alien Alex White

With Alien: Into Charybdis, the third book in the collection, White writes a different kind of Alien story. A mix of Office Space (without the comedy) meets Rogue One and Dungeons & Dragons, this is a dark adventure in a giant research facility of international IT and network guys duking it out over what goes where and why that just might make readers feel like someone is flipping a die before the characters enter the next room. It’s also very “first person shooter,” the kind of endless game you might find in Gears of War. Its strength is its dialogue, which almost masks its weakness: a story written entirely in present tense, which has the feel of a long roleplaying game. The Charybdis is an ancient Greek whirlpool sea monster that is mimicked here as a giant geological feature on a distant colonized planet–not surprisingly a dark and temperature changing environment that serves as a nice breeding ground for the franchise’s key beasties. Although I found this entry a mixed bag, its ambitious story belongs among these other good novels. Check out my earlier review here for more details.

Including all three of these complete novels, The Complete Alien Collection: Symphony of Death is available now here at Amazon. Look for Alien: Romulus in theaters August 16, 2024.

borg is your source for Alien franchise news. Check out my reviews of previous books and tie-ins in the franchise:

Alien: The Roleplaying Game

Alien and Predator comics

Alien: Out of the Shadows by Tim Lebbon

Alien: Sea of Sorrows by James A. Moore

Alien: River of Pain by Christopher Golden

Alien: The Cold Forge by Alex White

Alien: Colony War by David Barnett

Alien: Inferno’s Fall by Philippa Ballantine

Alien: Prototype by Tim Waggoner

Alien: Into Charybdis by Alex White

Alien: Enemy of My Enemy by Mary Sangiovanni