Review by C.J. Bunce
You know how you wish someone would try something different with a franchise you follow, but it never seems to happen, then from out of nowhere BAM! It does. In a recent review of another Alien tie-in novel I wrote: “In this 45th year since the original Alien movie, the franchise is either going to continue to expand in bizarre ways (like in Prometheus) or repeat the Colonial Marine stories with different characters in slightly different circumstances, which is sort of what we get with James Bond and Planet of the Apes. Or maybe it will surprise us with something new.” That something new is Alien: Seventh Circle from Philippa Ballantine, the latest original novel in the Alien franchise. It arrives in bookstores tomorrow and is available for pre-order now here at Amazon. I did not want this book to end. If you love science fiction, consider it your next must-read. If you love Alien, if you love cyborgs, get ready for a great new story in the franchise.
Forty-five years and counting, the Alien universe continues to branch out in new directions. Ballantine, who writes with Clara Čarij, created another solid entry in the franchise with her Alien: Inferno’s Fall novel, reviewed here at borg in 2022. You don’t need to have read that story before this, but Seventh Circle really is a sequel to Inferno’s Fall, which introduced the soldier Mae, an AI/Synthetic creation. Implanted in the chassis of a combat synthetic, Mae has a combination of the attitudes and behavioral elements of two of the best characters in the tie-ins not featured in the films: Davis, a Synthetic and former security drone who ended up as a disembodied Tron-type program, last seen in a dog chassis in Alien: Colony War (reviewed here), and Colonel Zula Hendricks, the best thing to happen to the Colonial Marines gung-ho types since the movie Aliens. Mae refers to the strong-willed and cynical Zula as her mother, and “hears” the “memories” of Davis in her programming (like Ben Kenobi mentoring Luke in Star Wars). She is an AI offspring in this way, part of a family unit like nothing we’ve seen before in the franchise. It’s something deeper than the protagonist of the latest franchise movie, Alien: Romulus, who was raised with a Synth as a brother.
We at borg have viewed the Synths of the Alien universe as cyborgs or borgs because they have always been called “biomechanical androids” and we’ve assumed some kind of cell-based component in their make-up, hence the “bio” in the word biomechanical. In this story Mae straddles the line well, operates at times as a “genetic human,” and revisits the timeless science fiction trope of “I think therefore I am.” She develops an amnesia-esque situation (a neat twist on Total Recall) where she has no idea she isn’t a real human. Zula does her best to hide her status as Synthetic from the rest of the world, and the hiding creates some fantastic human situations for Mae. At times she is like Samantha, the domestic witch heroine of the 1960s series Bewitched–she could use her abilities to solve a task in an instant, but with someone else watching she must instead slog through the slow human method instead.
Colonel Hendricks’ strike force of Jackals are a step up from the Colonial Marines, an elite squad without the failings of Stormtroopers. They always get the job done. Hendricks is leading them (with Mae) to find evidence of some mad science on a Weyland-Yutani station. We get a volley of other types of Synths, prototypes and whatnot, all who appear as secondary elements throughout the story, including one of those creepy Michael Fassbender-looking Davids, but also units that won’t be familiar to readers, further deepening the layers of the franchise world-building. But co-starring in this story is a Bishop model called Rook, unrelated to previous appearances of either the character Bishop (the Synth in Aliens) or Rook, who went by Ash in the first movie (I found this a tad confusing). Rook is pilot of the Blackstar, a vessel that aids Hendricks and the crew of the Righteous Fury as they investigate the station.
The story is chopped up into three timelines, beginning in the middle of the action later in the story. One timeline follows Mae and Rook trying to get help for the Righteous Fury crew, another unveils the events leading up to that, and a third finds Mae in the future with amnesia. The back and forth works well to tell this adventure, which features a chemical called Kuebiko, and a new way of weaponizing Xenomorphs. The story has its Xenomorph monster moments, but that’s not why the book is so good. It’s how real these characters feel. The best sequence involves Mae coming up with an idea to split herself and act in three places at once, the kind of thing that will make readers wonder why this hasn’t been done before in all sorts of major android, robot, or borg franchises.
Every new Alien tie-in novel is packed with suspense and innovative takes on Weyland-Yutani and its influence years before, during, and after the events of Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie. But count this as one of the best.
Fans of the franchise will love it. It’s great science fiction storytelling. Don’t miss Alien: Seventh Circle, arriving in bookstores tomorrow and available for pre-order now here at Amazon.
borg is your best source for Alien franchise news. Check out my reviews of previous books and tie-ins in the franchise:
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: Seventh Circle by Philippa Ballantine
Alien: Prototype by Tim Waggoner
Alien: Into Charybdis by Alex White
Alien: Enemy of My Enemy by Mary Sangiovanni
Alien The Complete Collection: The Shadow Archive Collection by various
Alien The Complete Collection: Symphony of Death by various
Aliens: Infiltrator by Weston Ochse
Aliens: Bug Hunt by various
Aliens: Vasquez by V. Castro
Aliens: Bishop by T.R. Napper
Aliens vs Predator: Rift War by Weston Ochse and Yvonne Navarro
Alien3: The Unproduced First Draft Screenplay by William Gibson and Pat Cadigan
The Book of Alien: Augmented Reality Survival Manual, by Owen Williams
Alien Covenant: Origins, by Alan Dean Foster
The Making of Alien by J.W. Rinzler
The Making of Aliens by J.W. Rinzler
The Art and Making of Alien Covenant, by Simon Ward
Alien Covenant: David’s Drawings by Dane Hallett & Matt Hatton
Aliens: Bug Hunt, anthology
Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report, by S.D. Perry
Aliens: The 30th Anniversary Edition
Cinema Alchemist: Designing Star Wars and Alien, by Roger Christian
Aliens: The Set Photography, by Simon Ward
The Movie Art of Syd Mead, Visual Futurist
Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo
Find the Xenomorph: An Aliens Search-and-Find Book
Tech Noir by James Cameron
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
Great review! I really enjoyed the continued story of all these characters. As a refresher, Rook and the Blackstar were introduced in Alex White’s Cold Forge and Into Charybdis. He even mentions Blue Marsalis, the main character of Cold Forge, who gave him the locations of other WY black sites which he brings to Zul in Seventh Circle.
Thanks, Michael! My confusion is this Rook is a (now battered, repurposed) Bishop model, and I can’t figure out why they would do that. In the unlikely event it gets adapted to a movie and Lance Henriksen can play it? Seems unlikely. And here with the movie Alien: Romulus coming out so near we had Rook, only it was a different Rook but not the Rook called Ash in Alien (???). As a reader I can always use some clarity in each book that a familiar named designated Synthetic is a specific Synth (in this case it was) like it was clear the attacker David was just a random David. I dig the options and opportunities of sharing tropes, since the Synth existence as story element is another play on the EMH stories of Voyager–sometimes it’s Voyager’s EMH, sometimes it’s a Robert Picardo lookalike cleaning the side of a space freighter, etc.