This was a fun read though I don't think it would have made a great movie. The pacing is fine for a book but too uneven for a movie.

Also fine for a book but not so much for a movie is how much of the story is relayed through thought instead of speech or, even better, action.

So what's the story? The ship with Ripley and Newt and Hicks and Bishop drifts into restricted space that's very much the territory of a sort of quasi-Soviet space community called the Union of Progressive Peoples.

It eventually ends up at a space station called Anchorpoint, where more aliens cause mayhem upon arrival.

Hicks and Bishop—who's given the first name of Lance here, presumably as a tribute to Lance Henriksen, one of about a million references to Aliens within these pages (although I think Bishop might be a stronger presence without a first name)—are more or less the main characters. Ripley never regains consciousness and she and Newt are both sent away on ships so they don't have to live through another xenomorph nightmare.

This time around the aliens are shown to have upped both their reproduction and adaptation games. They can infect hosts like a virus and just appear in a werewolf-like transformation with no forewarning, apparently from airborne spores or some such thing.

There's a lot of talking, a lot of characters, a lot of Hicks's remembering things people said and did from Aliens—I remembered them too and came to find it slightly annoying to be reminded so often of the previous story—and aliens popping out of all sorts of places, people and other creatures.

While Hicks is the main character here, I found Bishop's to be the most appealing voice. After copying all of the information they can get from him, the UPP return him to Anchorpoint with a new pair of legs. Their technology isn't exactly cutting edge, so Bishop has to deal with "cheap polycarbon knees" whose shortcomings are a serious problem in the last chunk of the book.

Anchorpoint also has a mall and Cadigan (and presumably Gibson) mine this for humor, always an essential component for horror. (It also adds a bit of a Dawn of the Dead element.) In general, the book is actually quite witty. Occasionally the comic note falls a bit flat but overall it's a breezy and fun ride, as far as gruesome survival horror can be breezy and fun.

One set piece, with the aliens and humans actually out in space, facing off in zero gravity on the exterior of the space station, would be excellent in a movie, especially if it involved more action than there is in the book.

Has this been in a movie? We're not really up to speed on Alien movies anymore. Some seen, fewer remembered.

It ends with a very clear path to a sequel or sequels, which was almost certainly a requisite as part of whatever deal Gibson signed with the studio.