Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson based on the story by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Alien: The Illustrated Story
1979 / Ecomic / 64 pages / USA****
From flying industrial cathedrals to innuendo-strewn biomechanics, I've always been more in love with Alien's production design than the story. This efficient adaptation captures all of that in rough storyboard sketches, while editing the action down to fit a 30-minute slot with adverts. Alongside Alan Dean Foster's highly-regarded novelisation, a screencaps storybook, souvenir magazine and The Book of Alien, pre-VHS Alien fans were well looked after.
Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space2000 / Audiobook / 560 pages / UK
***
Technically brilliant, well-written and relentlessly sinister modern sci-fi, in a really long and overbearing way that I found a slog. I would have found it easier to get through and paid more attention if it had been arbitrarily broken down into a series, like Gene Wolfe's novels. I could have just pretended it was, but it's a bit late for that revelation [space].
2001 / Ebook / 370 pages / USA
***
This hits all the right notes of suspenseful space Gothic – sometimes amusingly so, with its deformed Frankingstein orphan, corrupt clergy and literal space cathedral – but it's not very well written or original. That's what will happen when you set out to find a book that might remind you of a film.
Peter Watts, Blindsight2006 / Audiobook / 384 pages / Canada
****
Science fiction and horror are the more marketable genres Watts blends to explore his challenging philosophical ideas, and these dogged digressions and the supporting world-building are what make this so impressive, more than the rote Borg plot. No character gets off lightly as the author crams in concepts from AI and augmentation to virtual afterlife and credible vampires. I appreciated the value.
2014 (collected 2015) / Ecomics / 176 pages / UK/Argentina
***
I don't know whether Garth Ennis was being meta when he wrote this literal and figurative mash-up. It's all been done before, some of it ad nauseam, but the enthusiastically gruesome art makes it worth another go around.
