Alien Isolation.

A novelization of a game, now there s a modern creative conceit. One that the author manages to pull off with a degree of aplomb. Ellen Ripley's daughter Amanda has grown up missing her mother, haunted by a broken promise to see her again, in a future world where human beings are little more than units under the thumb of mega corporations. As she grows to adulthood she will learn that answers and truths can bring horrors of an unexpected kind that life does not prepare us for. Weyland-yutani have not forgotten the Ripley family, watching Amanda as she grows, drawing her into their a deadly web of chilling intent, with nothing benign in their plans for a family line which all but wrecked their plans and ambitions for the xenomorphic life form that in turn wiped out the lost crew of the Nostromo. 

             The whole nighmare is reborn when a salvage ship The Anesidora, led by a Captain Henry Marlow, lands on LV426, lured there by the mystterious beacon, pulsing away, warning the unwary off, actually serving to draw them in instead. The sequence in the game when the salvage ship touches down on the barren wind swept surface of the remote moon is one of my favorites in the whole alien mythos. They are a rough and ready small salvage team trying to eke an existance in salvage, against all the odds, and they just are in the wrong place, at the wrong time. i just thought they really did the work for this game, the unwelcoming enviroment of LV426, the Verne like space suits, the alluring spider web of the derelict, its all here. In a game!

              Keith Ra Decandido recreates the fall of the Anesidora  and takes us beyond that with the attention to detail the game deserves. Things go from back to worse for all who come into contact with this life form. in his hubris mankind believed itself at the top of the foot chain, even way out in the silent seas of the stars. When we should have been keeping our heads down, content with a modicum of comfort and safety we were instead poking around in places we should never have gone. 

              Alien Isolation is a warning to the curious.

              That there is a degree of safety in Isolation.