The alien predators like heat -- so why is one prowling Siberia, and killing people at a remote pumping station?
A secret American military group sends Lt. Schaefer of the NYPD to find out, and he joins forces with a Russian officer -- but that doesn't mean they trust each other.
This novel is an adaptation of Mark Verheiden's second four-issue Predator mini-series from Dark Horse Comics, based on the 20th Century Fox movies.
The original paperback is out of print as of this writing, but the novel has been reprinted along with Predator: Concrete Jungle and Sandy Schofield's Predator: Big Game in The Complete Predator Omnibus from Titan Books. (Which is not, despite the title, complete, it's just those three novels.)
Why I wrote it | What I changed | My research
How and why I wrote it:
I really enjoyed writing Predator: Concrete Jungle, and Dark Horse was pretty happy with the results, so they asked if I'd like to do another Predator novelization. I turned down Predator: Big Game on the grounds that I wasn't familiar enough with the setting (but actually because I didn't much like it), but I was happy to tackle Predator: Cold War, which was a direct sequel to Concrete Jungle, bringing back much of the cast, and scripted by Mark Verheiden, whose plotting and characters suited me.
You might wonder why I was willing to write about Siberia but not the American Southwest; well, at the time I hadn't been to either of them, but I figured readers were more likely to spot errors in a New Mexico setting. I'd studied Russian a little as a teenager, so I felt more comfortable with Russians than with Indians.
So I wrote it, and had fun, and made some money, but after that I felt I'd had enough of the Predators, and was happy to see Steve Perry take over the series.
Why I wrote it | What I changed | My research
What's different from the original comic books:
I didn't need to change much with this one; there weren't any issues regarding conflicts with movies. There were a few small things that were altered, though:
The opening of Chapter 9 was added so that I could work in a friend of mine, Jon Cohen, and the name of the comics shop he worked at, as a little in-joke. (Jon and I are now partners in Beyond Comics, and Collectors World, which was never in New York, is long gone.
The original comics had Schaefer making a joke about missing "One Life to Live." I thought that should be modernized, so I changed the TV show in question to "The X-Files."
I had forgotten that "X-Files" was also a 20th Century Fox property; they didn't want jokes about it. I was told to change it, so it wound up as "Melrose Place."
It was obvious that whatever his other talents, Mark Verheiden didn't speak Russian; he had some of the name forms wrong, and in one instance had a dialogue balloon supposedly in Russian where it's literally impossible to say that exact line in Russian -- the words simply don't exist. I corrected those -- most obviously, changing "Ligachev" to "Ligacheva." Surnames have gender in Russian; a woman can't be named Ligachev.
I also got the definite impression that Mark did not have much experience with really cold weather; some of his descriptions, while poetic, did not match my own experience of sub-zero conditions at all. (I grew up in New England and have spent some other winters in very cold climates, as well.) So I changed those, too. And I relocated the pumping station because there's no oil where he seemed to have put it. (He was sufficiently vague about the location that I wasn't sure where he had it, but I put it somewhere I knew there was oil.)
I didn't need to mess with the plot, though; that was fine just as it was.
Why I wrote it | What I changed | My research
Some background:
The main thing I remember researching for this one was Russian weaponry. Since I was working in text and couldn't rely on images, I needed to know what a Russian soldier would be carrying, so I read up on the AK-74 (not the familiar AK-47), and the newly-developed-at-the-time AK-100, and various other firearms. That was mildly interesting.
I also brushed up on Siberian geography, the Russian language, and a few other such details, but not very extensively. And of course, I watched both Predator movies again, and re-read my own previous novel. I wanted to make sure everything was as accurate and consistent as possible.
But that was about it -- there was nothing remotely like my long conversation with Lt. Kasanoff for Predator: Concrete Jungle, or the trip to New York to check out locations for Spider-Man: Goblin Moon. There was no series bible, the way there was with Star Trek. All I had to do was follow the original.
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