Knives That Hunt: Mira Grant’s Alien: Echo

When I discovered Seanan McGuire’s Mira Grant pseudonym was appearing on a novel set in the Alien universe, I was intrigued. Pairing a love of horror flicks with some solid scientific questioning led to great results in the mermaids books, the novel of which (Into the Drowning Deep) read like an Alien/Aliens inspired exercise in survival horror. That the Alien universe novel employs a queer narrator makes it a perfect candidate for our LGBTQA+ reading series this PRIDE month. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Alien: Echo tells the story of Olivia Shipp, a seventeen-year-old budding xenobiology enthusiast, daughter of scientists and twin sister to the sickly Viola. In addition to making a little extra money cataloging some of the stranger species on their current home colony world of Zagreus, Olivia is currently crushing on one of the colony kids named Kora Burton who is supposed to come and visit. She is in love with being in love, obsessing over Kora’s details, and generally behaving like the smitten teen she is. Her sister is more sober about these topics, pointing to the very real possibility of a broken heart since teen romance seldom works out in the end. This is never more true than on the planet Zagreus, where the colony is a bunch of conservationists taken to extreme—they might judge the Sierra Club harshly for leaving even footprints—while the Shipps are a kind of barely tolerated necessity, living away from the compound and not beholden to their water rationing and whatnot.

The opening chapters give us an eye view of the sisters in action, first with Olivia and then adding in Viola in chapter two. These chapters give us a building blocks method of world building, stacking details and characters to evolve this brave, new far-future world and the people who inhabit it. As well, they offer an early hint of the origin for the novel’s title, during Olivia’s reflection on being a twin:

Or maybe [Kora] is one of those colony kids who likes to get a few kicks in with a transient girl, knowing she won’t have to live with the consequences of breaking my heart. I’ve heard stories about a few girls like that, enough of them to leave me a little anxious and leave Vi fiercely, furiously defensive against anyone who thinks they’re good enough for her twin but hasn’t done anything to prove it.

The thought is enough to knock the smile off my face. It’s not that I don’t love my sister. I do. I love her more than every sun we’ve ever lived under, and since every sun is technically a star—as she is grindingly, pedantically fond of reminding me—that means I love her more than all the stars in the sky. She’s my mirror, my echo, the other half of my heart. It’s just that she’s also …

She’s also Viola. Stubborn and sullen and way too willing to prioritize facts she’s read on a screen somewhere over things she’s experienced for herself. Things like “ninety-five percent of all teenage relationships end in heartbreak, you know,” and “colonists don’t form permanent bonds with the children of transient scientists,” and my personal favorite, “I may not have met her yet, but even I can tell that she is way out of your league.”

Sometimes my sister can be a massive brat is what I’m saying here. (7-8)

Implying, of course, that Olivia knows she can be a massive brat as well. Which she can be.

As the narrative progresses, we will see the motif of echoes and reflections playing out again and again. On the echo side, some are warnings, some are screams of pain, and some are pleadings for companionship. On the reflections side, some are more or less authentic, the stuff of mirrors and duplication, while others are the products of distorted funhouse mirrors—for example, aliens who take on the characteristics of what they gestate inside and erupt from.

Before long, Kora arrives for a trip into the wilderness she has grown up nearby but never really visited (the colonists are ultimately agoraphobic about anything outside their little bubble residence). There they encounter a little danger and get away clean. We see how Olivia can think on her feet, particularly when a loved one is threatened. After this wee encounter, she gets her first kiss, which sets off her hormones in ways I can fondly (and not) recall my own hormones being set off. Olivia soon becomes obsessed with the idea of kissing in general and osculation with Kora in particular, and she’s over the moon. Ah, lovely New Relationship Energy (NRE).

Soon after this, there is a family meeting. The colony gov has selected Dad Shipp to receive a lucrative bonus if he will participate with a colonial team that is inspecting a recently arrived spaceship for potential hazards. He agrees, opening up the house for a possible house party, and soon after that party kicks off, the other shoe drops. An accident in orbit causes the colony team’s shuttle to crash on the planet, and it is carrying more than the remnants of the colonial group that went up to the newcomer. As you might have guessed, that ship in orbit was housing a case of badass bugs, and they are on planet now, ready to show the lion worms and colonists who the real apex predators are.

What follows is a well-executed action adventure story that follows Olivia on a few missions. Get her teen partygoers back to colony alive. Fetch her missing sister. Get to the bottom of the mystery what’s happening. Escape with as many survivors as she can. The book sets up its mission objectives one at a time and then knocks them down (often with twists and sorry surprises). Olivia grows as a character, forced to accelerate her maturity due to the dangerous circumstances. However, she is more than up for the challenge, and seeing her blossom is intriguing. Particularly when she finds herself caught up in unraveling secrets and conspiracies, one big one perpetrated by colonial government and the other perpetrated by the people Olivia thought she could trust—her own parents.

The novel has heart, heartache, action, an unexpected twist or two, and some memorable gross out moments. Mira Grant knows how to put her characters through the ringer before soaking them up for another go through. The book is a solid read that kicks off as a romance and switches gears into the kind of terror tale we expect for this franchise.

As I have mentioned before, McGuire (particularly under the Mira Grant nom de plume) seems to have an inline to the passions I pursued in my younger days and knows how to make thrilling novellas and novels out of the material. Her love for it as well is pretty obvious. Case in point, employing a gang of meddlesome kids for In the Shadow of Spindrift House. Case in point, aquatic horrors for Rolling in the Deep and Into the Drowning Deep. Case in point, all those pandemic thrillers (ala Michael Crichton, Stephen King, etc.) that informed The Kingdom of Needle and Bone. Alien: Echo is another of these passion projects that fuses a thrilling exploration of a known property with the author’s peculiar and particular brain workings. We get a more or less developed eco system outside of human beings and the ultimate invasive species. We get a family unit that turns some conventional gender roles on their ears. We get wild deviations between colonial policies and politics on this world and previous ones the Shipps have lived on; in fact, we get an encapsulation of the difficulties of being freelance scientists in this weird future. We get colonial secrets blowing up badly. And we get an enjoyable story about xenomorphs running amok.

Perhaps the xenomorph stuff takes a while to get rolling, but that is in keeping with the second flick in the series, which applies a four-act structure to its narrative as opposed to the more traditional three-act structure. We see that structure here as well, and it allows us the opportunity to get to know some of these characters before events switch gears from a teen rom-com into a nasty little sf-terror show.

Personal reflection time: In addition to his original material, author Alan Dean Foster has written a metric ton of novelizations and media-tie in work over his career. Among the many books I read as a kid, I can easily recall passages from the first Alien book—a novel I read years before seeing the movie that inspired it, in fact. Long before I became aware of things called cut scenes from movies (or the director’s cuts that restored them), I knew that Alan Dean Foster included extra goodies. Some of it was the psychological landscapes for these characters and some were whole scenes that never made it onto the screen. His novelizations included material that never made it onto the screen—such as Ripley encountering Dallas in the ducts, such as Ripley liking Wierzbowski more than Hicks in the sequel story, such as Ripley’s final encounter with Carter Burke, such as the hunt for the escaped dogs in his novelization of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Foster’s novelizations might never have been among my top ten favorite books of all time as a kid, but they were certainly books I returned to with regularity, comfort reading, books that helped me figure out what kind of a genre fan I would grow into. As might seem obvious, I can still heartily recall this stuff thirty or forty years later, so those books made an impact.

Grant’s novel operates on a similar wavelength to Alan Dean Foster’s books (or later notable additions to the Alien universe by the likes of Christopher Golden, John Shirley, Stephani Danelle Perry, and Chet Williamson). It is a comfort food kind of novel, playing to a franchise I was a fan of even before I saw one movie. It made me want to revisit those old books and the flicks that launched them. I like the way the author thinks. I like the characters she comes up with. I like the way she tells her stories. Well, for the most part.

I have previously noted the author’s penchant for pet phrases, teasing that some of her books would make solid material for drinking games. That tendency is found here, as well. For maybe the first half of the book, the word is “kissing.” For the second half of the book there is both a pet word (“sister”) and a pet phrase (“knives that hunt”) to keep an eye out for. I was particularly taken with that latter one when it first showed up. Knives that hunt is a great description for the Aliens. As the narrator notes,

It’s impossible not to remember what the seastead said about the creatures, that they were made of knives, because it’s true. Every line, every angle is perfectly designed for killing, from the sinuous curve of its spine to the bladed shape of its limbs and curling tail. My lungs are starting to ache, but I can’t stop myself from admiring the thing, even as it moves closer. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect and it’s terrible and it’s going to be the death of so many, and none of that can stop it from being beautiful. I can feel the shape of it in my fingers, where it aches to be drawn, put down on paper and pinned in place, so that I can study it at my leisure. I wonder if there’s a clear image on the recording of my father’s death, a single still shot that I could study. I wonder if I’ll ever have the chance. (209)

Before too long, however, the author uses that phrase or derivations thereof as her character’s identifier for those particular critters. It works because the character has a new toy to use, a hammer for a situation where every encounter looks like a nail. I understand why, but it’s still a tad repetitious to the eye and, for me at least, a tad annoying before too long. Not frustrating. Not enough to throw the book away. Just enough to make me grin and roll my eyes every other page for the last seventy pages or so.

If the book has an issue that irritates me, it’s the use of corps to describe corporate interests. The planet is owned by Weyland-Yutani, one of the big corporate interests in this universe. It is often referred to (in the films, anyway) as The Company. Corps is, in my silly head, not sounding like “corpse” and intended to relate to The Company and its rivals, but pronounced “core” and relating to the colonial marine corps (“Another glorious day in the corps!”). Sadly, it stopped me several times as I wondered, “Why is Olivia worried about the marines being so secretive. Ohhhh. She’s talking about The Company.” So, word to the wise, the narrative is relating to The Company and not the marines whenever it mentions that particular word.

As Vonnegut (another writer who developed pet phrases for individual books) might opine: So it goes.

From a queer fiction angle, it is nice to see a book that makes no bones or hesitation about being about a girl who is crushing on a girl. A young woman who falls in love with another young woman, the latter of which might well be bi. There’s even a character who has a pair of dads. It is more upfront about its sexual orientations than Gideon The Ninth was, for which I am pleased. The characters who get bugs up their butts about the relationships are motivated not out of homophobia but out of jealousy. They wanted to be the love interest, not . . . not . . . not an annoying, non-colony butthead like Olivia! It’s nice to read a queer positive, sex positive horror tale. Mira Grant’s portrayal of the sexual orientations and identities is as fluid and free as those found in the Netflix show She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

In a touching afterward, the author admits this novel was a dream project. The fun she has playing in this particular sandbox is clear in the prose itself. She’s loving it, and as a reader, I find her enjoyment to be infectious. Not my favorite of the author’s works, maybe, but I can see it becoming comfort reading. Something to revisit when I’m in the mood for a little teen romance angst that turns into a horrifying struggle for survival. If you’re anything like me, then this might be right up your alley as well.

Aaaaand as a bonus, there’s a great little cautionary tale on the copyright page that smacks of Mira Grant channeling Joe Hill (who includes fiction in various spots such as the Note on Typesetting or in the acknowledgements page). The copyright page includes this little bit:

People contain many things that can be stolen.

Organs. Blood. Bones.

It’s impolite to steal pieces of people.

It’s also impolite to steal books.

Don’t do the one, and the Bone Gnomes won’t do the other.

Sleep tight. (iv)

Isn’t that charming? Nothing to do with the book, but a pleasant surprise for people who like Easter Egg hunts.

#

Alien: Echo is available in eBook, hardcover and audiobook editions.

Next up, we check in with Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland, a Lovecraftian novella published by the folks at Tor.com. Grab a copy in eBook or paperback.

WORKS CITED

Grant, Mira. Alien: Echo. Imprint: 2019

“Knives That Hunt: Mira Grant’s Alien: Echo” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Cover image and quotes taken from the Imprint hardcover edition, released in 2019.

Disclosure: Considering Stories is a member of the Amazon Associates program. Qualifying purchases made using the above product links can result in our site receiving a cut of the purchase price as a payout from Amazon.com.

If you prefer to obtain the media we review without contributing to that company’s bottom line, we understand completely. There are plenty of alternatives for you to pursue. I would be surprised if this book is not available through a public library, say. Please don’t pirate. If COVID-19 is bad, the plague of Bone Gnomes is only going to be worse for you . . .