Alien: River Of Pain depicts what really happened during the downfall of Hadley’s Hope, the doomed colony from Aliens. While there was talk of a follow-up to Alien quickly after its release in 1979, which included a potential TV show or a low-budget sequel where another unlucky group encounters the derelict ship, it ended up in development hell due to a conflict between the studio and Alien’s producers. James Cameron was ultimately hired to helm Aliens, where Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley leads a team of marines back to LV-426 to rescue the colonists of Hadley’s Hope. They arrive way too late, with young Newt being the sole survivor.
Aliens became an instant classic and had a huge impact on the genre. This is especially evident in video games, where everything from Contra to Halo owes the movie and its iconography a big tip of the hat. The movie franchise never hit the heights of Aliens again, though the “Assembly Cut” of David Fincher’s Alien 3 has seen that entry being reassessed. Following the box-office disappointment of Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, the future of the series on the big screen isn’t known, though a reboot feels more likely than a direct sequel.
Alien also has an expansive universe covering video games, novels, and comics. Recent years have seen the release of the fantastic Alien: Isolation game – which depicts Ripley’s daughter Amanda looking for her mother on a doomed space station – and the very well-received novel Alien: The Cold Forge. In 2014 a trilogy of novels arrived that shared linked stories, with the first book Out Of The Shadows noticeably being a canon tale featuring the return of Ripley after the events of Alien, but before Aliens. The final novel Alien: River Of Pain by author Christopher Golden details the downfall of Hadley’s Hope on LV-426 and what exactly Weyland-Yutani was up to on the planet.
Of course, the events of Aliens make the outcome of Alien: River Of Pain a given, but it offers some intriguing new details. It turns out Newt was actually Hadley’s Hope first newborn baby and that Weyland-Yutani set up the colony so that when the derelict was discovered, there was a nearby population to infect. The novel also reuses concepts from the Aliens: Newt’s Tale comic, which includes Newt witnessing her father’s death from an air vent and the Xenomorph’s overwhelming the remaining colonists during the “last stand” mentioned by Frost in the 1986 movie.
Alien: River Of Pain also reveals there was a marine presence on the planet before the rescue squad from Aliens arrived, led by the book’s hero Demian Beckett. The novel’s ending isn’t quite the total massacre fans might be expecting, as a few lucky survivors manage to escape the planet, though Newt gets left behind. Alien: River Of Pain is an entertaining ride for fans and its tweaks to the canon are much less egregious to those found in Out Of The Shadows.
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