Adrift on the Sea of Sorrows

 

 

Yesterday I finished listening to the Alien: Sea of Sorrows audio drama. I've never read the book so it was all new territory for me.

I'll be honest, I got very scared a couple of times listening to this tale. I mean scared on top of a general feeling of creepiness sinking in from both ears. The first couple of times I heard the plasma rifles being fired, I think my fight or flight instinct kicked in. A shiver went up my spine.

It's a sequel to Alien: Out of the Shadows, which was also adapted into an audio drama. Here, a few hundred years after the events of the previous story, Alan Decker is pressganged into service by Weyland-Yutani as he has some psychic abilities and somehow dreams about Xenomorphs despite never having heard of them. It's off to LV-178 and its trimonite mines to secure a living Xenomorph for the arms division of W-Y.

Stockard Channing is a creepfest unto herself as Rollins, the cold, uncaring Weyland-Yutani apparatchik in charge of the mission. Good lord, her voice gave me the heebie jeebies.

This is all standard Alien fare - no new ground is broken here, really. But it was a great scare. And it made me wonder what kind of story could be had that broke the mold. How do you make a good Xenomorph story and break conventions at the same time?