It’s been a while since the last Alien film (Alien: Covenant was 2017), surely long enough for something gestating in this hypersleeping franchise to burst forth and cause merry havoc. And now here it is, Alien: Romulus, which I went to see on a Saturday afternoon at my local cinema. (Two days after its UK premier. I assumed it was best to book in advance, but there were only two other people there. I don’t think this is any measure of the film’s success globally, just a combination of a small town and good weather. Really, I’m glad we have a cinema at all.)

The film opens on a mining colony on the sort of planet where you never see the sun rise, and are equally unlikely to die of old age. The female lead Rain and what I at first thought was her autistic brother Andy, but who turns out to be a slightly malfunctioning android (and I’ve only just got the joke, Andy: Android — but he of course prefers the term “artificial human”, so should have been called Art), are working for the faceless (and hug-less) Weyland-Yutani corporation. Rain, whose parents are both dead (the mother, at least, due to working down the mines), has just clocked up enough hours to be released from her contract and sent off to a proper colony world, only to be told, sorry, due to manpower shortages — mostly, it seems, due to illnesses and fatalities — the company has just extended the minimum contract term and she has to stay for another five or six years. It’s then that her ex-boyfriend Tyler turns up with a proposal. A large chunk of space-debris due to crash into the colony planet’s (spectacularly rendered) Saturn-like ring is an old Weyland-Yutani station, and bound to contain some cryonic stasis chambers. If a small group of them get into it, they can remove the chambers and use them to make their own trip to the colony world of Yvaga, where Rain will be able to see the sun rise at last. Of course, we know from the prologue that this chunk of space-debris is a research station that picked up a certain biomechanical-looking thing from the fragments of the Nostromo… (Which, to pick at a minor point, should in no way have been clumped so closely together. Alien ended with not one but three massive self-destruct explosions.)

I’ve developed my own sketchy thematic outline for the Alien series. The first film is about pregnancy; the second is about motherhood; the third, after struggling through a few rewatches, is, I have to say, about rape (which, despite it being a well-made film, is perhaps why I find it somewhat repugnant); the fourth I haven’t pinned down yet, but might be about hybridisation; Prometheus is about abortion; Alien: Covenant, again, I haven’t pinned down. Alien: Romulus is full of children (twenty-somethings, yes, but still feeling very much like children) who have lost their parents (and most specifically their mothers, as at least two characters mention how they’ve lost theirs — in both cases due to the Company). It might be subtitled, then, “Raised by Wolves”, only the wolf that does the raising isn’t the benevolent she-wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus, it’s the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and far from feeding these motherless children from its body’s milk, it sucks the life out of them.

The ultimate aim of the research station is to create a new “perfect” strain of humans, through extracting a certain icky black substance from that biomechanical egg it recovered from the Nostromo wreckage. (And this is this film’s only major connection with the — aptly aborted — Prometheus-direction the franchise had been going in, and I have to say it’s done with the sort of light touch I prefer.) So, you could say, by the end of the film we get to see what a real “Raised by the Weyland-Yutani Wolf” child would look like. And I’m sure it would never call in sick, but I also wouldn’t call it human.

My basic feeling about Alien: Romulus is similar to how I felt about the recent (2022) Hellraiser film. Both are returns to a franchise that had been going awry, if not downhill. Both bring a more 21st-century sensibility — to me, they very much feel like they’re made by the current generation — and both are aware that they’re bearing the responsibility to pay proper respect to their originating films and provide something sufficiently box-office-worthy to enable their franchises to survive. As a result, they’re basically well-made films which provide some nice minor surprises, lots of nods to their originating films (maybe too many, sometimes), and a satisfying watch, but never stray into the truly challenging, truly shocking, truly visceral or mind-blowing, as those originating films did. That might be unfair to ask — great films are rare — but every sequel will be judged against its original. And anyway it’s probably better, in both cases, to have a solid success so the franchise can continue, than the sort of big-idea-loaded messes that Ridley Scott’s last two contributions were (despite being well-directed, shot, plotted, and acted). But, at the same time, you come away missing that essential something from the franchise, and that essential something is, it has to be said, the sort of transgressive, shocking, visceral weirdness that made the originating films so original. The original Alien seemed to exist in a constant state of shock at how weird its alien was; by Alien: Romulus, even the gloopier moments are handled in an almost offhand way, without that element of reverence or awe — that sense of the dark sublime.

(There seemed to be, in Alien: Romulus, a lot of business with doors, multi-layered difficult doors, with obstructive locking systems. I can’t help wonder if that doesn’t reflect, in some way, the creative atmosphere around a film like this, with the weight of so many requirements — commercial and artistic — putting a constant series of checks, blocks, and dead-ends in the way of really free creativity.)

The stand-out in this film, as all the reviews I’ve read so far agree, is David Jonsson as Andy the android, particularly when he gets an upgrade and suddenly becomes a corporation man. The other notable android — sorry, artificial human — is what for a brief second seems like a nice tribute to Ian Holm, as we see another of the same model of android that was Ash in the first film. But then he talks. And the special effects technology is not up to giving us a mock-up of Ian Holm moving his mouth in anywhere near a convincing way. (Film-makers: lay off relying on this until it’s convincing! It’s just creepy, and not in a good way.)

What I’d really like to see, I think, is an Alien mini-series, long enough for a nice, slow build-up and deeper characterisation. Aliens worked so well by tying the SF-horror of the original with another genre — military SF, or the Vietnam War movie — and I’d love to see the series tied to something like a political thriller, full of the sort of commercial shenanigans we only get to glimpse in the films. (Which makes me realise that, in the Alien films, the political and the commercial are one and the same. I’m sure my motherhood/reproduction-based reading of the films can be completely replaced by one saying that the whole series is basically about capitalism. Certainly this film.)

Anyway, basically a good film, and if I expect too much of it, that’s only because the first two instalments in the franchise are so good. I can only hope there will be more — while also hoping there won’t be so much more it becomes like Disney’s over-ploughing of the Star Wars franchise. But then again, Disney owns 20th Century Studios, which makes this, basically, a Disney film, so I can’t be sure that won’t happen…

The Martin White cover of Richard Adams’ second novel is one I remember seeing a lot in bookshops and school libraries growing up. I assumed Shardik (1974) was about a bear in the same way Watership Down was about rabbits, and it was only when I read Adams’ entry in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy that I found out it’s actually a fantasy novel, set in an invented world/lost past known as the Beklan Empire. I was intrigued to read it, even more so after Douglas A Anderson’s discovery of a review by Adams of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. I’d assumed Adams would be one of those literary-minded writers who wrote fantasy but scorned it in its more outright forms, but no, he was full-on enthusiastic for Tolkien at his most Tolkienesque. So I was even more intrigued to see what his own fantasy effort would be like.

Shardik opens with a bear fleeing a forest fire. Injured and desperate, it plunges into the massive Telthearna river, then struggles, exhausted, to the shore of an island. Lying there, this monster of a bear is seen by the hunter Kelderek, who immediately recognises it as the promised return of Lord Shardik, not a god but “the Power of God”, and so best treated as a god all the same. Returning to his people, the Ortelgans, he’s so dumbstruck he can’t make the expected report, even to the Baron Bel-ka-Trazet, and even under threat of death. A message arrives, summoning the Baron to the isle of Quiso (the holy isle of the bear-cult) and he takes Kelderek with him. There, the hunter can speak at last, and tells the high priestess, the Tuginda, what he saw. Equally convinced this is Lord Shardik, the Tuginda and her priestesses set about the dangerous task of tending to its wounds and following it wherever it goes. It strikes one of them dead, seemingly at random, but they accept this as the act of their god. (Kelderek, meanwhile, is apparently able to go right up close to it and remain unharmed, though he doesn’t do this often enough for it to be absolutely non-coincidental.) It’s a brilliant beginning, which really conjures these peoples’ puzzled awe at this dangerous but sacred creature, with no clear indication of where the story is going next.

The second of the novel’s seven sections sets things on a different tack. Not all the Ortelgans are immediately convinced the bear really is a messenger from God, but one, Ta-Kominion, decides to take advantage of it anyway. Declaring the bear’s appearance to be a sign that the Ortelgans — once rulers of the Beklan Empire, but now living in semi-primitive conditions on an island far from the central city they built — must rise and re-take the capital. An army sets forth, but Ta-Kominion knows it will only succeed if the bear is there, at the front, as a symbol and inspiration. He bullies Kelderek into dropping his reverence for the animal enough to drug it, cage it, and transport it to the head of the army. And just as the Ortelgan rabble encounter the Beklan army, Shardik wakes from his stupor, breaks out of his cage, and goes on a hangover-fuelled rampage into the opposing force. It’s another great moment, perfectly avoiding the question of whether this bear really is a messenger from God, or just a big, angry animal.

It was from here, though, that the novel started to lose its power, for me. The next section begins with Kelderek installed as Priest King of Bekla, and basically the head of the entire Beklan Empire. We learn that, to get there, he had to further compromise his principles. To break the siege of the central citadel, it was necessary (we’re told) to start executing hostages — including children — until the citadel surrendered; then (we’re also told) it has also been found necessary to start up the slave trade — again, including children — in order to fund this new incarnation of the Beklan Empire. We don’t actually get these decisive moments described, they’re just summarised as having happened, and this, I think, is a major mistake. In the first part, Kelderek was an innocent: just a hunter, awed by the sight of this massive bear, and something of an outsider among his people, who called him “Kelderek Play-with-the-Children” for his befriending of orphans. Suddenly he’s responsible for child enslavement and murder, and we don’t get to see him making those decisions, so we don’t know why he made them, or what he felt about doing so. Already compromised by Ta-Kominion’s persuading him to give up his reverence for the bear and cage it, whatever presence as a character he had is now utterly broken, for me as a reader. Kelderek didn’t have enough character-weight to bear these self-betrayals, and for the rest of the novel came across, to me, as a blank, a cipher, a cut-out of a character rather than anything like a real person. Unfortunately, he’s also the main character, and so he has to carry the novel.

What made this a bit more damaging was that the book also backed off from exploring the implications of its intriguing set-up — the fact that a savage bear was being treated as a messenger from God — and all its many potential meanings. After that moment where Shardik seemed to lead the Ortelgans against an enemy army — but could have been just an angry bear in the right place at the right time — I wondered if the novel was going to keep up a string of such moments, where people interpreted the actions of what might simply be a savage creature as those of their God. It might have started to feel a bit absurd after a while, but would have made for a fun read. Adams, though, didn’t do this, and from this point the bear doesn’t do much at all.

I started wondering why Adams was writing this book. Sometimes it’s evident why a writer’s telling the story they’re telling. They might be simply following the course of a plot, they might be seeing where a particular character takes them, they might be exploring an idea or theme, or they might have a definite thing they want to say. In his introduction to the 2014 edition of Shardik, Adams wrote, of the origins of this novel:

“The idea came to me spontaneously to write about a character like the tragic heroes of Ancient Greece, who secured great blessings for their society but paid heavily for their accomplishments in terms of personal suffering…”

But Kelderek, to me, just didn’t have enough weight to be either tragic or a hero. His sufferings, when they came, just didn’t happen to a character for whom I felt capable of registering suffering — he was too passive, too empty — and the only “great blessings” he brings to his society I can think of are when he says, near the end of the novel:

“…children are the future, you see. If there were no unhappy children, then the future would be secure.”

Which was his attitude at the start of the novel anyway, so he didn’t need his experience with Shardik to learn them — in fact, his experience with Shardik took him away from his valuing of children, and it’s not like, when he recovers it, he spreads the belief throughout the Empire. He just continues to do it locally, as he did at the beginning of the novel. (Plus, that “children are the future” grates in the mouth of a fantasy character, though that may be down to it being the first line in a Whitney Houston hit from the next decade…)

Another thing Adams says in his introduction:

“Shardik is about the religious impulse and the nature of worship. Its themes are as relevant today as they have ever been — power, politics, corruption, and the nature of religious faith.”

But I don’t think Adams examines these things as much as you’d need in a long book like this, for them to feel like they really are his themes. By placing a savage animal at the centre of this religion, you’d expect him to be saying something — either about misplaced beliefs, or the innate savagery of human nature, or the proper reverence for nature, or how you can take anything as an object of reverence if you interpret it right — but I don’t think he does. A quote from Jung in the book’s epigraph — “Superstition and accident manifest the will of God” — is equally ambiguous. (Is Jung, here, saying that the will of an actual God comes through in seemingly random events, or that it’s how we human beings interpret random events that reveals to us what we’d expect our “God” to be saying, and so they’re really just a way of revealing our own beliefs to ourselves? I’d expect the latter from Jung-the-psychologist, but Jung-the-mystic might have meant the former.)

There’s another reason people write books, and one I quite like, which is where a writer is processing some difficult, even un-processable, experience, and are driven to create, to try and understand themselves and what happened to them. Usually this comes with a feeling of a particularly strong imaginative charge centred on some situation or occurrence. I only began to feel that might be happening in the penultimate section of Shardik, where Kelderek finds himself captured by the child-slaver Genshed. Genshed, although just a human being — even if an utterly reprehensible one — is invested with an almost supernatural aura, as one of his captives explains:

“He’s been granted the power to make others evil—to make them believe in the strength of evil, to inspire them to become as evil as himself. What he offers is the joy of evil, not just money, or safety, or anything that you and I could understand.”

And:

“God’s given in. Either that or He’s got no power over Genshed.”

The Second World War — which Adams served in — is just the sort of thing to provide one of those “difficult, even un-processable” experiences. (And Adams says, in his 2014 introduction: “lest any should suppose that I set my wits to invent the cruelties of Genshed, the slave trader, I say here that all lie within my knowledge and some — would they did not — within my experience.”) The way Shardik’s reappearance is almost immediately twisted to become a pretext for war could be taken as a comment on how the Nazis curated a new version of their national mythology to back up their belligerence. And another statement made of Genshed is exactly the sort of thing you find so many people saying, in so many ways, after the Second World War:

“Cruelty and evil—they’re not very far down in anyone. It’s only a matter of digging them up, you know.”

The section with the child-slaver Genshed was, for me, a slight revival in the book’s narrative — in terms of the meaning the book was exploring, anyway, though it didn’t entirely connect, to my mind, with the earlier sections. Overall, though, I think it’s the opening where Shardik is at its best (and the very first chapter, with the huge bear floundering in the face of a forest fire is absolutely the best), but after that it really didn’t repay the effort required to read it. (Which sounds harsh, but there was something about Adams’ prose style in this novel that I just couldn’t read as quickly as I wanted. It wasn’t bad, just somehow slow. He had, for instance, a fondness for some very convoluted similes that took several sentences to convey. An example being: “as when some severe and demanding leader, whom his men both respected and feared, is reported lost, they loiter silently, addressing themselves with assumed diligence to trivial or futile duties in attempts to evade the thought that none will utter—that they are now without him whom they trusted to stand between them and the enemy…”)

Adams was evidently pleased with Shardik. (He even wrote a prequel, Maia, in 1984.) His Times obituary quotes him as saying:

“I thought it was my best book, but no one else thought so … They wanted another Watership Down. What they got was Shardik and they didn’t like it.”

Apart from Watership Down, the only other book by him I’ve read is The Girl in a Swing, a supernatural-tinged love story with hints of pagan mythic forces being brought against modern, middle-class Christian mores — again, very different from Watership Down, but more successful, I think, than Shardik.

Jean Morris’s YA novel The Troy Game (1987), set in Dark Ages Britain, starts with Brannock, second son of the King of the Seven Kingdoms, being sent on a mission by the druid-like Elder, Mennor. There are rumours of invaders coming from the east, and Mennor needs a message taken to his Order at Caerdroia. He chooses Brannock because of his ability to use a “bob” to detect not just water and buried metal but hidden paths, as the way to Caerdroia is a secret to those not of the Order. Stopping off at his uncle’s kingdom, Brannock is given his eldest cousin Eilian as a guide, as she has accompanied their own Elder at least to the start of the hidden way. And as they embark on the final section of the journey, Brannock and Eilian begin to realise they are tracing a vast troy, like the ancient, now-fading dance-patterns in their own villages.

The book opens with such impatience to get Brannock on his way (entirely excusable in a YA novel) that the reason for his mission feels almost like an afterthought. Vague rumours of invaders from the east, and Mennor never explaining why he’s not able to take the message himself — it’s evident Morris basically wants to get her pair of protagonists onto the vast troy and tracing its weird path as soon as possible. And the troy is obviously the main point of interest, here, not the invaders from the east. It’s presented as not so much a man-made thing as a concentrated mystical aspect of the land itself. Walking the wrong way doesn’t just get you lost, it produces some dark, nightmare-like experiences; try to shortcut the circular path, and you’ll find yourself ejected and unable to find any part of the troy — entrance, exit, or even where you just were.

Perhaps it’s the effect of having read Mythago Wood and its sequels, but the troy, here, feels very much like one of Holdstock’s mythogenic landscapes — particularly with Holdstock using terms like “the oak-vortex”, and “the ley matrix”, as though the troy were just a more ordered version of the same whorls of weirdness. Inside the troy, what seems like a small forest proves to be immense; an old Roman villa with a slightly ghostly inhabitant can be entered at the same point from two different directions; there are sudden changes of weather, as well as of landscape, all just as in Ryhope Wood. There’s even a hint of the same ancient, pre-human world behind it all:

“This was ancient deep forest; not the mild open kind that could be travelled with little trouble, but the oldest oak forest, where men never went, where the vast trees grew and died and toppled and rotted untouched, as they had done since the beginning of the world.”

For most of the book, The Troy Game feels at the younger limit of YA — its getting quickly to the journey without bothering with much set-up, the vagueness about the invaders from the east and the broadly archetypal characters (kings and queens as parents, wizard-like old men as village elders) — but things take a disturbing and more complex turn towards the end of the book. The invaders from the east, when encountered, aren’t simply barging in Viking-like and taking over, they’re seeking alliances with the aim of fomenting a civil war, but claim to be merely looking for a new home. (In the wonderfully double-edged words of one of them: “we come in peace but in strength”.) The Elders themselves are divided as to what to do, and their leader seems too weak to really accomplish anything. Mennor, then, makes a desperate move, and summons the Wild Hunt, despite knowing it will not simply attack these invaders, but throw the land itself into chaos:

“The Wild Hunt may be invoked, but not controlled; once the Hunt is up, its prey is everything in its path.”

And that’s what happens. Chaos, then ruin. After recovering from the Hunt’s passing, Brannock begins his journey back from Caerdroia, and it’s as though the air of fantasy has gone from the lands he passes through: he’s out of story and into history. The Seven Kingdoms ruled by his father prove to be seven villages; the invaders from the east — blond and tall — are now scattered among the people of the land, married to village women, with young families already, making a go as farmers, not warriors. Why, then, the terror of the Wild Hunt? It’s as though all the Hunt did was stir everything up in one big land-wide cauldron, then leave people so disorientated there was no room for thoughts of war or conquest, merely survival. The invaders are part of the land now, and the land itself has spent something of its mystical power.

Brannock realises his recovery from the chaos of the Wild Hunt didn’t just take weeks or months, but perhaps years. None of his relatives recognise him. After the younger-end-of-YA feel at the start of the novel, there’s a distinct note of something broken and lost — the magic has gone away, and the Dark Ages story-world of kings and queens and elders has been replaced by a more realistic land of farmers and villagers repairing roofs and tilling the land.

None of this is overly examined and, in a way, that makes it less immediately dark than it sounds, but also more mysterious. Still, there’s a haunting feeling to the ending, the sense that the world has irretrievably changed from the magical-mystical to the historical. As a story — particularly read as an adult — it feels a little unsatisfying, but nevertheless there’s a poetic air which is quite appropriate for such a short book.