Dark Horizon
by K.W. Jeter
1993 Pocket
The Alien Nation TV series ended in 1990. In 1993, the book series started, some based on unproduced scripts - my guess is they had some of season two already written. Then in 1994 these scripts were used for a series of TV movies, which lasted until 1997.
The book has two stories somewhat intertwined, both of which seem to be bog standard Alien Nation plotlines - a group of bigoted humans seeks to exterminate the newcomers, and the newcomers' slave masters threaten to come to Earth to recapture their property.
Lots of emotional subplots - Sykes and Cathy relationship, Sykes gets jealous of George's promotion, Albert gets married. Buck gets into Catcher in the Rye and stalks a teacher, which is very in character for him.
The plotting of Dark Horizon works for two episodes of a TV series, but is awkward for a novel. It would have worked better as two distinct halves, but it's presented as a single story, so you get a climax 3/4ths of the way in, then a whole new story.
It was true to the series, but there'd be a learning curve for new readers. Jeter does my least favorite thing I see in straight novelizations - to fill out page count, we get several pages of internal monologue of minor characters, and usually not in a way that adds to the story or fleshes out the characters.
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