Parker and Brett patch up the ageing Nostromo while openly voicing their resentment at the officers’ better pay, while the officers are irked by the engineers’ perpetual disgruntlement. Foster establishes the uneasy tensions between the officer class on the bridge – Ripley, Lambert, Kane, Ash and Captain Dallas – and the working class engineers Brett and Parker below decks. His book captures the tone of the movie, while also expanding on the drama and tensions between the central characters – not to mention the deadly movements of the alien itself.įoster eloquently introduces his characters in these opening pages, first among them warrant officer Ripley as the most resourceful and insightful member of these truckers in space.

Yet Foster, one of the most prolific writers of novelisations and genre novels in general, approached Alien with what feels like great care. Novelisations essentially a marketing tool – released around the same time as the films on which they’re based, they’re written quickly and bundled onto bookshop shelves without much fanfare. The intervening years may have diminished the impact of its bloodiest moments, but the air of astral coldness is still as potent as it ever was.Īlan Dean Foster’s Alien novelisation succeeds in capturing that same chilly essence – quite a feat, given that the author wrote the book in just three weeks, with what appears to be an early draft of the screenplay, and without having seen a photograph of the title creature. Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, Ridley Scott’s Alien remains a timeless exercise in atmosphere and suspense.

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