Aliens: Steel Egg
Someone on Earth knew about the aliens. Someone battled them, and survived. Before Ripley, there was a first encounter. Aliens and humans have fought before! When a human spaceship discovers a vast egg-shaped vessel in Saturn's orbit, the crew powers in to investigate. Thinking the ship might contain usable metal for Earth, they force their way aboard. Three teams split up to explore the ship. Already the aliens have awoken. The first of all the battles unfolds.
John Shirley
John Patrick Shirley (born 1953) is an American science fiction and horror writer of novels, short stories, and television and film scripts.
John Shirley's most significant cyberpunk novels are City Come A-Walkin and the Eclipse (A Song Called Youth) trilogy. Avant-slipstream critic Larry McCaffrey called him "the post-modern Poe". Bruce Sterling has cited Shirley's early story collection Heatseeker as being a seminal cyberpunk work in itself. Indeed, several stories in Heatseeker were particularly seminal, including Sleepwalkers, which, in just one example, probably provided the inspiration for William Gibson's "meat puppets" in Neuromancer. Gibson acknowledged Shirley's influence and borrowing ideas from Shirley in his introduction to Shirley's City Come A-Walkin.
Aliens
Aliens consists of fifteen primary books, and includes three additional books that complement the series but are not considered mandatory reads. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Main series Alien Universe
