Alien: Into Charybdis

A Novel (The Alien™ Series, book 9)

By: Alex White

Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio

The critically acclaimed author of Alien: The Cold Forge takes listeners to a rogue colony where terror lurks in the tunnels of an abandoned Weyland-Yutani complex.

“Shy” Hunt and the tech team from McAllen Integrations thought they’d have an easy job - set up environmental systems for the brand new Hasanova Data Solutions colony, built on the abandoned ruins of a complex known as “Charybdis”. There are just two problems: The colony belongs to the Iranian state, so diplomacy is strained at best, and the complex is located above a series of hidden caves that contain deadly secrets. When a bizarre ship lands on a nearby island, one of the workers is attacked by a taloned creature, and trust evaporates between the Iranians and Americans. The McAllen Integrations crew is imprisoned, accused as spies, but manages to send out a distress signal - to the Colonial Marines.

©2021 Alex White (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

ok

If you really like aliens than it’s worth it if you have nothing else but by far the weakest of the new aliens stories. The reader wasn’t part talent wise she is actually a good reader i think. But was a very strange choice when it seemed like there were 3 main characters and 2 were male.

Surprisingly good!

At first I had feared this title was going to go the "Hurray, Americans in space! Booooo everybody else!" route that plagued a lot of 90s and 2000s sci-fi, but the character development and the overarching theme of corruption being a universal constant for humanity really set this one apart. I didn't think the author would be able to top Cold Forge but was pleasantly surprised.

great addition to the Alien universe

Outstanding scifi novel set in the Alien universe. Narrator does a beautiful job bringing to life a ton of characters. Wish they would use novels like this as basis for the films.

Awesome!

An awesome loose sequel to Cold Forge! If you like a story that takes its time and pays it off, you'll like this book and it's predecessor, Cold Forge.

Better than Cold Forge, still not great

The author corrects the biggest mistake from his previous Alien novel (The Cold Forge): the horror movie cliche of smart people doing stupid things that get themselves and others killed. He comes close to repeating his biggest error from Cold Forge, inventing incredibly contrived ways for his main antagonist to keep winning right up until the end; but only subverts the trend slightly. At least he avoids centering the book from the antagonist’s perspective like he did in Cold Forge (other than two chapters).

The book never answers whether the person in charge of the marines really was acting under orders or not and the ending makes little sense, as any government would have just disavowed her actions to save face regardless, and yet, purely for the purposes of setting up the colony war in the next novel, this book ends with America apparently saying the commander’s obvious war crimes were justified. Governments don’t admit to war crimes, they cover them up or blame someone else when they can’t be covered up. The obviously politically expedient response of any government would be to call the commander a rogue and scapegoat any surviving marines.

Plus, the characters in the novel even talk about how they could start a war by releasing proof of what the commander does in the novel; a situation that could have been avoided by the good Marine simply recording his testimony BEFORE broadcasting his evidence.

I’m intrigued by seeing a wider view of the Alien universe offered by the concept of a colony war, but this book really doesn’t do a good job of being an inciting cause for that war. Pretty much worth reading only for the background info for the next novels or if you want to know what happens to a character from Cold Forge.