Review Tuesday: The Space Vampires aka LIFEFORCE by Colin Wilson

 

 

The Space Vampires

aka

LIFEFORCE

by Colin Wilson

When a giant alien space craft is discovered approaching the Earth, the occupants have a sinister goal.

After FINALLY watching the 1985 movie LIFEFORCE in its entirety and seeing that it was based on a book. I needed to investigate. I quickly learned that the movie was based on a campy sounding 1976 sci-fi novel by the name of THE SPACE VAMPIRES by Colin Wilson. Then my BFF informed me that the author was unhappy with the deviations from his original story. Okay, I'm in!

 

In the future the crew of a space shuttle discovers a giant alien space craft approaching the Earth. Members of the crew go aboard the alien craft to investigate and discovered to find a bunch of creatures with the appearance of humans in some state of sleep. Three specimens were selected and brought back to Earth. The lovely female seemed to awake and adsorb the LIFEFORCE on a young man. Then she simply walks off. 

 

That's something like the first 20 pages of the book. There are two hundred more thereafter that develops a tale of vampirism, both of this Earth and other-worldly. I kinda feel like there are a lot of threads precisely crafted and developed but ended up being dead ends. The story is fun and easy to read, but it really seems like a whole large part was tossed in just to add pages to the book. It wasn't bad. It was quite clever really, but seemed somewhat disjointed for that reason. It's a VERY different story than what you saw on the screen with the movie version. Don't go into this expecting mobs of zombie vampires sucking the life out of London. It has a shockingly low body-count. However, you will find most of the key scenes within these pages. So I would call this one worth your time to read. 

 

It's not too hard to find. Amazon carries it and you can read it for FREE on the Internet Archive.