DW: Alien Adventures

Remember the 2-in-1 books from before? They are back still as two adventures, but this time in a more straight forward, one orientation printing that puts one story before the other. This one involves Alien Adventures.

The first adventure is the Underwater War by Richard Dinnick. The problem with this story is that Richard has taken 'for children' to mean 'childish'. There's 'Show, don't Tell', but here we have 'don't Show, or Tell, but express what happens in a very condescending childish way that would offend a five year old'. There are some very badly written passages here that made me wonder if there was an editor anywhere near this. The actual story itself is about humans coming to an alien world and trying to exploit it. (I kept flashing back to seaQuest DSV.) The aliens are quite nice, and would have worked better had the nature of the writing not made them seem negative dimensional. This should have been better.

Rain of Terror by Mike Tucker is better written, but in this case 'for children' falls into the trap of 'having child characters', so we get a few scenes written from a rather basic child perspective. The story is an alien invasion (of a sort) (and, amazingly, doesn't become a base under siege story), although the resolution to said invasion is very quickly done. The bulk of the story is really just interactions between people, now I think about it... but they are handled well that the story kept the pace up. Nice!

Only one decent read in this set, but they both fly by so quickly, they could easily have been 'Quick Reads'. Only half recommended.

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