Or Predator: Forget Everything
There are few franchises I have loved as much as Aliens versus Predators. I have almost all the original books, all the films (yes even the abhorrent AvP) and all the PC games (I am not touching the tacky console ones). So after taking a blow with AvP I decided I needed to rekindle my interest and with the recent release of Predator: Forever Midnight, I thought I had the chance to bring back some of the old memories.
Let me say now, do not, under any circumstances, buy this book if you know anything of the general back story to the predator universe. The author either didn’t care or didn’t know anything about the predators; changing names, conventions, mannerisms and hunting styles willy-nilly. Anyone with just a passing interest in the series probably wouldn’t care, but when you’ve grown up with these creatures and begin to understand the way they are supposed to act it feels thoroughly demoralising, as if a star trek book attempted to rewrite the Klingon language ignoring all previous material.
But it gets worse. The characters are ill-defined, you feel nothing for them. An affair between feuding husband and wife does not belong in a book about blood and gore. The son seems pathetically annoying, like Dakota Fanning’s character in War of the Worlds. I’ll try not to spoil the story for you (however weak it is) but certain actions and events are given no purpose or meaning, they just seem to spontaneously happen for reasons unknown.
The setting, the remote planet of Midnight, is home to a large array of weird plants and animals, with some in between. The problem is the writer spends a good portion of the book going on about them, every few pages it’s a new plant or animal attacking the humans or causing other troubles. You get to the point where you’re like ‘I don’t care about a biting tree, I want to see action’!
As I said earlier, the most annoying part is what Shirley has done with the Predators. Predators now indiscriminately kill women and children (something even the first film disproved), they switch gender randomly (where this came from I have no idea), they have multiple slave races under their control (yet you are only ever told of one) and they now have an entirely different vocabulary. Gone is Yautja replaced by Hish, all sentences end in Destroyer of Worlds or other such babble. Did the author even read any of the other books? Did he ever see this said or used? No! Because it wasn’t, it’s stupid and pointless. He couldn’t just write a decent story about Humans versus Predators set on a remote world. Instead he has to fill the pages with crap and then get it released under the Predator franchise.
In case it isn’t painfully obvious I didn’t like this book. I still have Aliens: DNA War to read so perhaps I might still find some comfort in that, but for now I am going to complain as much as I can.
