Product Description

The year is 2117 A.D. Humanity has seized the stars, using reverse-engineered alien technology to explore the far reaches of space. For a hundred years, the Predators, sadistic extraterrestrial hunters, have been a dim memory. For a hundred years, we've been safe. That ends now. Cast in daylight for years at a time, the almost eternally lit jungle planet known as Midnight is the home to more than a thousand colonists, explorers building a haven on a new world. But the settlers aren't alone. The Predators have been on this planet all along. When the ravenous creatures attack an arriving spacecraft and capture the settlers as both slaves and prey for their hunt, terraforming the planet takes a back seat to a new fight for survival.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #326457 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

About the Author
John Shirley is an award-winning cyber punk and horror author, who also co-wrote the cult-classic film The Crow

Customer Reviews

Predator: Forget Everything
I have been a fan of everything aliens vs predator for over 10 years now. After the disapointing AvP film I felt I really needed something to rekindle my interests. So I bought this and Aliens: DNA War. Let me say now, I hate this book. The author seems like the most ignorant person on Earth. There is an awful lot of canon in the AvP universe, but he seems to ignore it, re-defining the predators as how he sees fit. For example in the first predator film and most of the books, predators won't attack the unarmed. Here? Fair game, slaughter anything.
The writing style seems childish, as if the writer just found a thesaurus and went crazy with the big words when describing something. The characters are extremely weakly defined, you feel nothing for them and their actions are completly random.
Do yourself a favour, get one of the older AvP books, Predator: Concrete Jungle is one of the best. Just don't get this.

Predator fans, avoid this book.
The Predator movies, comics and books have, over the course of nearly 20 years, established a unique and much-loved race of monsters. Sadly, that backstory is completely ignored by this book.

I'm not familiar with John Shirley's own books. Here, Shirley writes a decent 1950s/60s pulp SF story, with very heavy nods to Larry Niven's Kzinti stories. If it were a standalone novel, with its own aliens, it would merit 2 stars - a mediocre time-filler but certainly not great.

The problem is that he's working with a very well-established setting, which he completely ignores. If you're expecting the lethal, quasi-mystical warriors of the movies, forget it; the aliens in this book are stupid, fawning, temperamental creatures, who are wiped out in droves by human tricks. This seriously damages any sense of menace that might otherwise have been generated. Shirley has basically used the Predator logo to get readers to buy the book, then ignored the very things that created the fanbase in the first place.

In summary, if you're a fan of John Shirley this is an OK read. If you're a fan of the Predator series, AVOID.

Worst book I have ever read!
I pre-ordered this book about 4 months before it was published and I couldn't wait to get hold of it. The first few pages were very hopeful. I was almost trembling when I read them. Unfortunately it quickly degenerated into the most ill-thought out nonsense I've ever read. As a comedy, it could almost work, but as a tie in to my favoutire movie franchise I couldn't help but feel insulted, particularly as it's author professes to be a fan.

Highlights include the predators trying to gun down unarmed women and children; using mind control devices to turn humans into hunting dogs and later to turn them into radio-controlled toys for predator kids; predators spouting such compliments to each other as 'may a cool breeze blow across your reproductive organs, oh Devastator of Destinies'; two predators getting stoned aboard ship while their mind-controlled human pet plots to blow them up; and so many other insults to the franchise that I've thankfully forgotten half of them.

Please, I implore you; if you are a fan of the franchise, or even if you have an iota of respect for it, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!