Alien 3

Alien 3: By Pat Cadigan and William Gibson

A brief history first. This particular book of Alien 3 started life as an unproduced screenplay by William Gibson, and has been translated into a fantastic novel by Pat Cadigan. There is a novelisation of the movie, but this isn’t it. In fact, while this is Alien 3, it also has absolutely nothing to do with Alien 3. This Alien 3 is completely different from Fincher’s Alien 3––any of the cuts. So yeah… hopefully that makes sense.

If you want further proof this isn’t the Alien 3 you know, Newt and Hicks aren’t immediately dead, there’s no prison planet anywhere in sight, and… Ripley’s not even the main character in this book. In fact, she’s barely in it.

William Gibson and Pat Cadigan’s Alien 3 reads more like a Cold War Space Horror with the Capitalist Weyland Yutani at Anchorpoint and the UPP (Union of Progressive Peoples) at Rodina Station both making the same mistake of believing they can use the Xenomorphs as a biological weapon. Naturally, it goes FUBAR, and a not dead Hicks and Bishop are left to clean up the mess.

The first thing that stood out for me outside of the whole Hicks and Newt not being dead thing was the writing. Pat Cadigan instantly creates a much bigger world than we are used too in the franchise: Recounting the history of the human race, the previous two movies, and the politics within the system. And the writing is superb as well. She has a cheeky humour to the way she writes which I absolutely adore, and there’s so many fun characters that you either want to survive, or read about their horrible death.

Hicks is great, and is the main character of the story, while Ripley is sidelined––probably for Alien 4 if everything went to plan. Bishop grows as a character, and there’s some nice scenes with the not dead Newt. The Xenomorphs go through some metamorphosis too, but i’ll let you read about those.

The politics within the book are written in an aggressively funny way, and some of the corporate characters are thankfully set up for very satisfying deaths (was getting retail flashbacks with how they spoke) There’s a lot of characters overall due to the multiple locations, and it’s best not to get too attached to any of them as this is Aliens after all––really the closest comparison is in fact Aliens.

The books a good length with a tight story and brilliant characters. It’s violent, funny, and has plenty of heart. Really, having now read it, it’s amazing to me they didn’t go with this script. The book probably isn’t considered canon, but going forward, it will always be Alien 3 in my mind. I’d recommend it both as a great book, but also a fascinating read of what could have been. Also, i’ll definitely be reading more of Pat Cadigan, I really liked her writing a lot. Now just need to work out how to get a copy of her Jason X book for less than a few hundred pounds.