Here’s the book description on Libby:

“An Audie Awards 2021 finalist, Aliens: Phalanx delivers medieval carnage as a pre-industrial society fights extinction at the hands of a massive infestation of Xenomorphs, …”

Okay, medieval tactics versus Aliens?! Say no more, I’m hooked!

Here’s how it starts:

Stillness is strength.

The black demon came closer.

Ahiliyah stayed strong.

She breathed slow, steady, deep. The way Aiko had taught her.

Ahiliyah moved nothing, save for eyelids; she even blinked slowly, making no motion that might draw the beast’s attention.

Oh wow, that instantly set up the stakes. A demon is hunting and Ahiliyah must stay still to avoid being detected.

Her gloved hand gripped the handle of her knife, the kind called little friend. Not a loose grip, where the knife might fall and make noise. Not a tight grip, either, where her hand might tire, start to shake, make her breathe faster.

The demon’s rigid belly stayed low to the ground, its four backsticks reaching up to the noonday sun. Its tail—a black spine as long as its body, ending in a vicious blade of bone—twitched behind it. A long, thin arm reached out, spindly hand silently resting on a rock. The big body moved forward, a silent shadow.

Now, I know that the demon is an Alien, but I wonder what I would’ve imagine if I hadn’t seen the movies, especially with “four backsticks”? Maybe four literal sticks?

The demon stopped, still as the mountain itself.

Okay, so she’s on a mountain. At this point I’m imagining some desolate rocky place like Mount Everest.

Mount Everest

Black lips curled back. Sunlight gleamed off metallic teeth. The jaws slowly opened; the toothtongue extended. It, too, opened—the demon let out a low, barely audible hiss. It angled its long black head left, then right.

It was hunting. If it found her, she would die.

Had it seen her? Had it seen Brandun or Creen? Ahiliyah didn’t know where her crewmates had hidden. She dared not move her head, even a inch. If the demon spotted big Brandun or little Creen, there was nothing she could do for the boys.

And now I know that Ahiliyah is worried about her crewmates as well. Also, she is so scared that she didn’t even move her head an inch. I love prose like this that lets me into the head of the characters. Even though the POV is third person, just asking the question directly like “Had it seen her?” instead of “She wondered if it had seen her” makes it so much more intimate that it almost seems first person.

What I don’t like though, because I can’t parse it, are visual details like:

The demon started moving again, stop-starting its way across the fallen, bleached trunks of alkan trees, through the thick, crimson leaves of the caminus bushes, over the rain-streaked, moss-spotted grey boulders and jagged piles of broken stone.

Since this story doesn’t take place on Earth and I never heard of alkan trees or caminus bushes, I can’t even imagine what it looks like. All the colorful details don’t make it into my mental picture at all as all I “see” is the grey, rocky landscape of Mount Everest because that is what “mountain” conjures up in my mind. Only thing I got from that entire paragraph was that the demon was moving carefully.

Some paragraphs later:

See the beauty. Ahiliyah did as Sinesh had taught. She widened her vision, took in all before her. The tans and grays of the mountain’s endless stone. The bleached tans of old logs. The deep crimson of the caminus bushes. The brownish-yellow moss. The pale green-white pokey plants that had managed to find a patch of soil. The blue sky. The mountain’s rich fragrance.

I kind of skipped through all of this, picking up words here and there like “logs” or “bushes”. Of course, to me, logs are brown because I see freshly cut logs, and bushes are green, as is moss. “Pokey plants” to me is grass. I am unable to parse any of the colour details like “bleached tan”, “crimson”, “brownish-yellow”, or “pale green-white”. And none of these things are actually in my mental picture of what the scene looks like, which is the side of Mount Everest.

The demon’s head slowly turned. The beast stayed motionless for a long moment, then scurried away, faster than the shadow of a flying bird.

This is a really strange comparison to make. How fast is a flying bird on this world? All I “see” is something like a drone shot where the shadow of a bird is gliding across desert dunes, the dunes’ differences in height making the shadow warp and distort. Which doesn’t really match with what I “see” before I read about the bird’s shadow, which is just an Alien crawling or “scurrying” away.

Anyway, despite all this visual detail that I just ignored, I gave the book ★★★★✰ on Goodreads because Ahiliyah is simply a great character to read about. I didn’t notice anymore strange comparisons or details that I ignored from this point on, either because the author didn’t use them anymore or I had simply begun filtering them out so as to better devour all the character bits. The book also fulfils the promise of the title, giving battles between humans using phalanx tactics against hordes of Aliens.

From this point on is SPOILER TERRITORY. Abandon your hope of being spoiler-free, ye who enter here.

SPOILER WARNING

It is almost to the end of the book when I notice something odd. In the story, Ahiliyah, Brandun and Creen meet an android named Zachariah. Zachariah is a useless character, only there to info-dump, and the information he dumps is downright detrimental to the story.

“Due to cascading system failures brought on by sabotage and internal use of firearms, I had very little flight control,” Zachariah said. “The ship suffered extensive additional damage upon impact. I was able to awaken one hundred and nineteen children, all ten years old or younger. I got them off the ship immediately, as I knew that the demons on board might have survived the impact. The children left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some seed kits I gave them. No tools, no weapons, no reference material, no computers. It was very rushed, very chaotic. I instructed them to get as far away from the ship as they could, as fast as they could, and to never return.”

Now before this nugget of information, Zachariah states that he is 334 years old and has been waiting for 319 years.

Consider now this passage from halfway through the book:

Sixty-seven years ago, nearly half a million people had lived on Ataegina.

This is absolutely bonkers. If Zachariah has been waiting 319 years then it took at most 319-67 = 252 years for the population to go from 119 to 500,000. For 119 to reach 500,000, it needs to be doubled 12 times, which means that the population doubled every 252/12 = 21 years.

As to why this is absolutely bonkers, consider that the current time for the doubling of the Earth’s population is around 48 years. This is with all the advances in medical technology that has brought down the maternal mortality rate to 0.003%, which is 3 in every 100,000 births, and childhood mortality, defined as children who died under 5 years of age, to 4%.

But if you look at the statistics for 1900, maternal mortality was around 0.5%, which is 500 deaths every 100,000 births, and childhood mortality was 36.2%. If you go back even further, to 1800, maternal mortality was around 1% and childhood mortality was 43.3%.

Consider also that it took 125 years for the global population on Earth to go from 1 to 2 billion between 1803 to 1928 and perhaps you might see why a population doubling time of 21 years in this story is just bonkers, especially if there are Aliens running around.

Frankly, I don’t think that 119 children with nothing but clothes and seeds would have survived an Alien at all. I think the story would have been a lot better if the author had just left this part out. Zachariah is only there to give Creen the confirmation that Alien tails can be used as a makeshift spear, which he could have easily figured out himself if he had stumbled across an Alien carcass impaled with an Alien tail, especially since there was a war between two different Alien hives 92 years ago according to Zachariah.

But despite this gaffe, Ahiliyah is still a great character to read about. She is the reason I gave the book ★★★★✰ even though the timeline is nonsensical.