Alan Dean Foster continues to deliver the good on the Alien series with the 3rd instalment Alien 3 (not the most original title). This is a much better read and I recommend it to anyone who found the movie to be somewhat lacking. Again it has additional content that was not seen in the movie until the extended addition was released in 2006. It is much more gripping read than watching the movie and provides a much stronger sense of who the characters are. I don't recommend reading this without having read the previous novels as there is too much back-history to brush over and could leave the reader asking WTF?!?! There are some ironic twists and strong turns in the story and Foster executes them perfectly in a setting that is new to the series.Not as scary as Alien, not as action-packed as Aliens but just as thought provoking and entertaining as both. Some readers can pass on this but if you are a fan, then I think you will enjoy the novel.Plot ***Spoilers***Following the events in Aliens, the Colonial Marine spaceship Sulaco experiences an onboard fire and launches an escape pod containing Ellen Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and the damaged android Bishop who are all in cryonic stasis. During the launch, the ship's medical scans of the crew's cryotubes show an Alien facehugger attached to one of the crewmembers. The pod then crashes on Fiorina 'Fury' 161, a foundry facility and penal colony inhabited by all-male inmates with "double-Y" chromosome patterns and histories of physical and sexual violence. After some inmates recover the pod and its passengers, an Alien facehugger is seen approaching the prison dog. Ripley is taken in and awakened by Clemens, the prison doctor, and is told she is the only survivor of the crash. Many of the ex-inmates have embraced an apocalyptic, millenarian version of Christianity, and Ripley is warned by the prison warden, Harold Andrews, that her presence among them may have extremely disruptive effects.Suspicious of what caused the escape pod to jettison and what killed her companions, Ripley requests that Clemens perform an autopsy on Newt. She fears that Newt may be carrying an Alien embryo in her body, though she does not share this information. Despite protests from the warden and his assistant, Aaron, the autopsy is conducted. No embryo is found in Newt's body, and Clemens proclaims she simply died in the crash. Meanwhile, Ripley's unusual behavior begins to frustrate the warden and is agitating the prisoners.A funeral is performed for Newt and Hicks, in which their bodies are cremated in the facility's enormous furnace. In another section of the facility, the prison dog enters convulsions, and an Alien bursts from its body. The Alien soon begins to attack members of the colony, killing several and returning an outcast prisoner Golic to his former deranged state. To get answers, Ripley recovers and reactivates the damaged android Bishop, who confirms that there was an Alien on the Sulaco and it came with them to Fiorina in the escape pod. She then informs Andrews of her previous encounters with the Aliens and suggests everyone work together to hunt it down and kill it. Andrews does not believe her story and explains that the facility has no weapons. Their only hope of protection is the rescue ship being sent for Ripley by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.Back in the prison infirmary, while talking to Ripley about the situation, Clemens is killed by the Alien, but when it is about to attack Ripley, it suddenly pauses, then retreats, mysteriously sparing her life. She runs to the mess hall to warn the others, only to see the Alien kill the warden. Ripley rallies the inmates and proposes they pour highly flammable toxic waste, which is stored at the facility, into the ventilation system and ignite it to flush out the creature. An explosion is caused by the creature's premature intervention, resulting in several deaths. Using the medical equipment aboard the Sulaco escape pod, Ripley scans herself and discovers the embryo of an Alien Queen growing inside her. She also finds out that the Corporation truly wants the Queen embryo and the adult Alien, hoping to turn them into biological weapons. Deducing that the mature alien will not kill her because of the embryo she carries, Ripley begs Dillon, the religious leader of the inmates, to kill her, who agrees to do so only if she helps the inmates kill the adult creature first. They form a plan to lure it into the foundry's molding facility and drown it in molten lead by trapping it by closing a series of doors. The bait-and-chase style plan results in the death of Dillon and all the remaining prisoners, except Morse, who pours the lead. The Alien, covered in molten metal, escapes the mold and is killed by Ripley when she turns on fire sprinklers and sprays the beast with water, causing its exoskeleton to cool rapidly and shatter via thermal shock.While Ripley battles the Alien, the Weyland-Yutani team arrives, including a man named Michael Bishop who looks identical to the Bishop android, claiming to be its creator. He tries to persuade Ripley to undergo surgery to remove the Queen embryo, which he claims will be destroyed. Ripley refuses and steps back onto a mobile platform, which Morse positions over the furnace. The company men shoot Morse in the leg, and Aaron picks up a large wrench and strikes Bishop over the head with it. Aaron is shot dead, and Bishop and his men show their true intentions, begging Ripley to let them have the "magnificent specimen". Ripley defies them by throwing herself into the gigantic furnace, just as the alien Queen begins to erupt from her chest. As she dies from the wound, Ripley grabs the creature, holding on to it as she falls into the fire.The novel concludes with a sequence describing the facility being closed down, the last surviving inmate, Morse, being led away, and of the Sulaco escape pod as the sound recording of Ripley's final lines from the original Alien film is heard.
this book is good, but different from the movie, I will name some key differences. 1. The facehugger impregnates the ox instead of the dog. Riply wasn't attempted to be raped. 3. the Doctor isn't addicted to morphine. 4. theirs a lot more language then the book. 4. the xenomorph is (spoilered) differently then in the movie. 5. the chestburster doesn't come of of Riply while committing suicide. 6.the ending is different then the movie.This book starts up pretty slow, when riply (the only survivor from the ship) crashed on fury, then she is dragged up and into the prison complex, there she is in a coma for a few days instill she is revived. After this the leader of the complex says the news to the sexist prisoners. Saying that the population will become impure. Shortly after the non survivors are burned and the xenomorph comes out of the dog and the book really begins"Shortly after the xenomorph comes out it starts eating people, and when the costodial staff think that the company (wayland) will say them then riply says"the company don't give two shi*s about prisoners who found god at the *ss end of space" after that the prisoners actually fight back, after that the alien kills most of the people get the xenomorph into the lead mold and (I will no longer continue the plot because of spoilers)I give this book four stars, it is a very violent book and contains pervasive language, if you can handle that, i will recommend this book to anyone who can handle this.
What do You think about Alien 3 (1992)?
ADF's writing is on par with Aliens (#2) -- which is v. good. I don't think the story/screenplay/material he had to work with/go off was all that adaptable to novel form. And I don't think ADF was allowed to deviate much.Unlike the other Alien novels in the trilogy, Alien 3 can be skipped -- the film works much better (and I liked it better than others have rated; it's orch. score by Goldenthal is esp. good and can't be "novelized").On the topic of film-based adaptations and "novelization" ... "pre-filming" can REALLY work FOR a novelized book (begin first with good source material: experiencing a very good (well-written/plotted/imagined/realized) movie; watch/experience in a good theater or home-theater) ... this method/technique effectively seeds/lubricates one's imagination ... which makes reading the novel a better, more dynamic, more interactive imagination. I think people don't realize how much effort the human brain* has to put forth when reading: it's major multi-tasking job in that it entails multiple mental layers/skills (textual reading, temporal character/event tracking, image-based world-building, sound/music imagination & cue generation, etc.). * The human brain is the biggest calorie hog of any organ, consuming a whopping 20% of total energy (calorie) intake. Roughly, one can compare to the CPU "brain" (Intel/AMD) of you PC, which consumes as much power as a 75watt bulb -- computing power, biological or technological, does not come cheap!
—Hollowman
I have never read the novelization of a film before, so when I saw this at Goodwill I thought to myself, "this ends today." Anyhow, the book itself is pretty much the Assembly Cut version of the film (basically what David Fincher had intended on releasing). I found it relatively entertaining but that's mainly because I've seen the film and can visualize it in my head. The author really doesn't offer much on the description front so without the prior viewing it would've been a 1 or 2 star. I suppose the best thing I can say is that it made me want to see the film again.
—Bryan North
