The Female War: Aliens, Book 3

Let me also add that this is by far the best and most creative story of the first 3 books, and maybe more as well. I feel that the story in this book should have played into a movie somewhere. It would have been alot better than ALien Ressurection I feel. 5 stars again.

A fun book, it caps off the 1st major Aliens arc nicely. I can't argue with it.

While Nightmare Asylum cast a madman in the role of the villain, Female War returns it to the banana headed bugs we've come to know. And it's focused on the biggest one of them all, the queen mother.While it's a very nice book, I have a few criticisms about it.The characters, other than Wilks, Billie, and Ripley, aren't very well deveoped. So there's isn't any real sense of loss when one of them gets killed.The ending offers some closure but also opens up new questions. I think that almost everyone who read this book wonders what happened to the crew? Based on some stuff in Genocide, we know the mission was a success but how does the crew explain hijacking a ship, taking it for a ride to a far away planet, getting some of the marines on board killed during the mission, and setting off some nukes in the Pacific Northwest?There are also a few criticisms in the aliens in the book. First of all, the queens have 6 arms, not 4. Second, what would be the point of having a queen mother? If the aliens don't have the ability to travel into space and to other planets at whim, wouldn't having an alien that only produced queens quickly put hives in competition with each other over limited territory? Of course, it might make sense if the theory that the aliens are another alien's engineered living weapons . . . But at heart (or whatever vitals they have), these are still the black-shelled monsters we've know and love(?)But despite these flaws, the book is really good. We didn't exactly spend lots of quality time with the marines in Aliens either and the queen mother is just one really nasty creature instead of an out-of-place being when you actually read the book. Having Riply and Billie right next to the perversion of motherhood of the queen mother was a nice touch. And finding out why Ripley is here when the book is set after Alien 3 is just as interesting as when the crew goes to the ground with the bugs.

Wow! This is the very best of the Aliens books. Kudos to Steve and Stephani Perry! They should make a movie out of this one!