Alien: Sea of Sorrows Review

This week I decided to review Alien: Sea of Sorrows by James A. Moore. The story opens on New Galveston, a newly terraformed and colonized world which has a problem. While breaking ground on a new city a small area of toxic sands was found. Unfortunately, this poisoned area soon began to spread rapidly destroying all life in its path, becoming known as the Sea of Sorrows. The Interstellar Commerce Commission sends a team including Deputy Commissioner Alan Decker, the protagonist of the story and an empath, to investigate and discover what has gone wrong. Soon after concluding that the planned city which became the origin point of the Sea of Sorrows was built on the site of a long abandoned colony used to mine and refine Trimonite, with the toxins resulting from contamination caused by the refining process being unleashed by the efforts to break ground there, Decker is injured and sent back to Earth. His report blames the Weyland-Yutani Corporation for failing to discover the mines before establishing the colony. Soon after delivering the report he is first suspended from his job then kidnapped by agents of Weyland-Yutani. It seems he talked during his sleep while on the journey back to Earth, He talked about things he couldn't possibly know about, things that were sealed long before he was born. The corporation investigated him and discovered that he is a descendant of Ellen Ripley, who played a key role in halting the company’s efforts to obtain samples of the aliens known as Xenomorphs for study. They explain that her descendants owe the corporation for the damage she caused and offer to write it off if he will join a team sent to the Sea of Sorrows where Weyland-Yutani believes there are Xenomorphs awaiting capture in the mine and the ancient alien city found near it. If not, they will retaliate against him and his children to get the money Ellen Ripley owed them due to her actions. Decker agrees to go and enters the underground mines with a team of mercenaries but things soon go wrong and the mission becomes a desperate struggle to catch a Xenomorph and make it back to the surface alive as an army of Xenomorphs awakens. Decker’s empathic link to the Xenomorphs and the ability to sense them coming that it grants may be the team’s last hope, but the aliens know that he is a descendant of their most hated enemy and will stop at nothing to claim vengeance against her family.

I give this book a 9.5 out of 10. The author did an incredible job of capturing the feel of the best parts of the Alien movie franchise in my opinion. Even the parts of the story which were light years away from the namesake Sea of Sorrows sent chills up my spine at times and I honestly was almost never certain what would come next throughout the tale.