A bit different then the movie but over all if you love the movies then you need to check this out .

The development of "Alien 3" was always an interesting thought process. The tricky element was who to bring back, how to make it function and how to up the stakes. Eventually, David Fincher made a more dark and brooding take, which while interesting, definitely had a more somber feel to it while lacking some of the thrill structure of the original opting for a more existential approach. That is why reading the novel adaption by Pat Cardigan of the unproduced "Alien 3" screenplay by William Gibson, plays so well. Maybe it has to do with reflection but this story takes the texture of the 2nd film and gives it a new area in which to play. Neil Blomkamp wanted to maybe do an older version of this kind of story but this takes into account Hicks and Bishop still in their prime. But the reasoning behind it being shelved is clear in the way it handles Ripley and Newt, which might have been what the studio was dealing with in terms of options and/or negotiation. One can see a little of "Alien: Resurrection" in a different way, but this story is much tighter and dynamic, more akin in certain ways to the Disney film "The Black Hole" than the previous "Alien" movie.

In the interest of not giving too much of the plot away, the Sulaco is picked up initially by people who don't quite see what they are dealing with but the twist of it is what makes it interesting. This might be due to Gibson's fascination with cybernetics or body horror but it makes sense, even if the science is a little flimsy. It all comes to bear in a later space station meant to be an outpost to Gateway. This structure in the case of what happens, the political structure and the pace is what really makes it work. It becomes a different approach for Hicks while establishing a whole new team mixing both civilian and military that needs to achieve a goal that perhaps can't be surmounted and achieved. What we loved about Bishop and Hicks is still there but made much more dynamic. Granted we are in their heads a little more but it could have been easily transferred to the screen by the right director.

Those different archetypes so prevalent in "Aliens" are definitely here in Jackson, Sorretti, Torrina and especially in Spence, who ends up being a fantastic character simply in the way it creates her arch in many different facets. Most of the sequences, save for a tricky one at the end, could have been primarily doable at the time (1992) though expensive (yet Cameron pulled off something just as big with "Aliens"). The adaptation here of Gibson's screenplay is every bit as detailed as the movie would have been and Cardigan does integrate in aspects of the previous characters in certain ways like ghosts on Hicks and, to a point, Bishop's consciousness giving a nice sense of connection and a chapter which would have been great. It would have sent the franchise in a much different direction than it did....but perhaps that would have been for the better. A

By Tim Wassberg

This is a thoroughly hard writing gig for any writer, let alone an experienced one like Pat Cadigan. I love William Gibson with all my reading-heart, but not all of his ideas for Alien 3 were great. Most notably, a new, violent way for the xenomorphs to replicate. It just feels unnecessary, and it's quite silly. The xenomorphs already have an ungainly reproduction cycle as it is, Gibson doesn't make it smoother. He also leans in on the idea that the xenomorphs are biological weapons, which has become canonical in the Alien universe, and dear reader, I don't like it! The alien=weapon idea takes away so much of the mystery surrounding the creature, and makes it less frightening. Two 'that said's to add to that - I'll give Gibson a pass on using that idea, as he wrote his script in 1987, and secondly, some of his ideas seem to connect with the canonical 'black goo' from Riddles Scott's later films.

The novelisation has problems. It picks up right after Aliens, and the Sulaco is found by an interesting anarcho-communist space colony, who take the halved android Bishop', get jumped on by xenomorphs, and find his files on the aliens and what happened in Aliens. They then send the Sulaco on its way, sans Bishop for now. The Sulaco is found for a second time, by Anchorpoint station. This is where most of the action will take place.

And that feels like such a missed chance! The idea of an Alien film inside the Union of Progressive Peoples nation-state sounds much more interesting! But we get Anchorpoint, and colonial marines, and Ripley and Newt get shipped off the station, they barely play a part in the book, and so we have Hicks as a main character, and Bishop as a prominent side character. And a lot of other people that are going to die.

Bishop is a strange character. He is written as a "what.. is.. love" robot, which makes little sense to me. He keeps comparing himself to humans. He'll use a figure of speech, and then note to himself he is using one of those figures of speech humans like to use, but why would he think like that? I find it hard to believe he has been programmed to speak, but without knowledge of figures of speech. And even if he has learned them over time, their just part of human speech, which he already knows. He already speaks like humans speak, and doesn't wonder about that. OH ALRIGHT, I'm going to let this go before I give myself an aneurysm.

Overal, Pat Cadigan's writing is smooth, and the book is made up of a lot of small chapters. Cadigan isn't a horror writer - her writing isn't very atmospheric, and worse, it's missing the visceralness you need for an Alien novel. We have to see, hear, smell and feel the horror. Her descriptions are too flat, too matter of fact.

There are a lot of characters, and I wish Gibson had chosen Bishop as his main character. Hicks gets a lot of little flashbacks to Aliens, lots of lines quoted from that movie, and I'm not sure what that's supposed to add. Surely people who read this book will have seen Aliens..? What does it add to Hicks' (flat) characterisation? A few times a character from Aliens will step out of his memories, and say something new - that's pretty cheesy, but at least it adds something.

This was still a time where basically every Alien story had to end the same way, and of course this book is no exception. Still a little bit disappointing, mr. Gibson.

I'd say this book is a curiosity for the more ardent Alien fan. Go in with low expectations, and you'll get the most out of it.

Pat Cadigan has a talent for writing stories. Although I had read the script and the comic book, this is the best installment in the Alien 3 original script I have read.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first book from the Alien franchise that I have read and its definitely piqued my interest. Well written, great characters and a new way of looking at Alien 3.

A very solid story that I feel honestly could have been a stronger film than the Alien 3 we got (which, to be clear, I actually love, but this story is probably better). I'm a huge fan of Alien and I loved seeing how this story built off of Aliens in interesting ways that felt much more rewarding in terms of most of the characters that story featured.

Adapted by author Pat Cadigan, this book is an adaptation of the unproduced screenplay for the troubled Alien 3, penned by William Gibson.

While David Fincher's movie, which has been disowned by the director himself, is a stark contrast, this is very much a case of what if?

Gibson tells a very different tale. There are no prisons, skinhead Ripley or killing off of major characters from the previous film.

Barring fleeting mentions Ripley very much takes a backseat for this adventure, with Hicks and a reanimated Bishop taking the leads instead.

While both of their POV's are interesting, you can't help but feel there is a Ripley sized hole in the plot.

Gibson also plays with the mythos of the Xenomorphs and their larger counterparts, with the xeno's able to gestate and expel from any part of the human body whilst the the big black aliens now literally become their human hosts through spores and then tear their way out of the bodies, making for some interesting and gory visuals.

Cadigan does well making this story feel at home in the Alien universe and while we may have seen some things before there is no denying this would have made a very interesting and potentially, polarising film.

My thanks to Titan Books for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Alien - Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson’ by Pat Cadigan and William Gibson in exchange for an honest review.

This is a novelisation based on Gibson’s never-produced first draft screenplay and written by Hugo Award-winning novelist and “Queen of Cyberpunk” Pat Cadigan. It is a direct sequel to Aliens and in it Gibson reveals the fates of Ripley, Newt, the synthetic Bishop, and Corporal Hicks.

As for the plot: four years after the events in Aliens the Colonial Marines vessel Sulaco, carrying the survivors of LV-426 in hypersleep, is intercepted and docks with Anchorpoint, a moon-sized space station and military installation. Of course, there’s a face-hugger on the Sulaco and before you know it a new form of Xenomorph makes an appearance with the expected results.

This was very different to the eventual third Alien film as in Gibson’s screenplay Corporal Hicks and Bishop are leading the action. I have to admit to being a little disappointed to have Ripley sidelined though it was still enjoyable with plenty of Alien style horror and government/corporate shenanigans. Hicks was one of my favourite characters in Aliens, so I was happy to have him alive and in full commando mode.

The opening summary of the events on LV-426 was priceless, a bit of levity before the horror. The commentator describes Ripley as the ‘crazy cat lady’ because she had blown up the Nostromo but saved the ship’s cat.

I rather wish that there had been a foreword or afterword about the turbulent history of the screenplay. While I have enjoyed the Alien films, I am not particularly familiar with the behind the camera goings-on.

Also, full marks to the design team at Titan Books for a striking cover.

What could have been. I’ve been huge fan of the Alien(s) movies from the very start, and I blasted through this story in just over a day. I’ve watched all films numerous times (yes, including even the less than stellar Alien vs Predator flicks). And it’s undeniable that the original Alien and the follow up Aliens are best of the series, both being absolute classics in my opinion. So I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to read an eARC of Alien - Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson (By Pat Cadigan and William Gibson). Despite what the title says, it’s not really a screenplay, at least it isn’t a shooting script but rather a novelization of the screenplay. Had they gone with this story, Alien 3 wouldn’t have just been the next installment in the series it would have been more of a direct continuation of Aliens than what we got in the actual film version of Alien 3. Unlike in the movie version of Alien 3 where only Ripley and Bishop (kinda) survive, so do Newt and Hicks! And honestly that is probably the reason they didn’t use this script for the movie. As those familiar with the previous installments know, Ripley was the face of the franchise. And in this version of Alien 3 …well without posting any spoilers let’s just say her role is less than active participation. This version of the story introduces a number of new and memorable characters and the storyline delivers the same wonderful mix of action and horror as the previous installments, though they also made a number of changes to the aliens and how they operate. I would have loved to have seen this script used, in my opinion it might have been a better direction for the series to take, but as mentioned earlier, given that Ripley had become the central character to the film series I understand the studio’s reluctance to use a script that basically makes her little more than set decoration.
4.5 stars (rounded up to 5) I’d like to thank Titan Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an eARC of Alien - Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay By William Gibson by Pat Cadigan and William Gibson, it was a fascinating look at what could have been.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2IUAPN4DJ400J/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

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Alien - Alien 3: The Lost Screenplay by William Gibson by Pat Cadigan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm going to play a little game here.

We all know this isn't the official take on the Aliens universe bible, because the xenomorphs get a massive upgrade in their danger level, going way beyond the life cycle that we've come to know and love. It's more along the lines of Prometheus and it explores just how nasty things could really get.

I'd call it the real Aliens 3 if I could get away with it. It increases at the same rate that Alien became Aliens, and not going backward like the movie we actually got.

In this original screenplay, written in the '80s by William Gibson and later given the novelization treatment here by Pat Cadigan, we even get the wonderful continuation of Hicks and Bishop and Newt. They weren't just killed off. Ripley is kinda missing, but we're dealing with a believability factor that the Aliens 3 movie also had to deal with.

On the other hand, scale and scope and delicious destruction and widespread world-collapse IS something that we can all get excited about. It's the reason why we keep going after the Aliens franchise novels, always hoping that they would break out of the formula mode and generally always being disappointed.

So. If we assumed that this original story WOULD have become the standard, avoiding all the subsequent cash-grabs, BUT also fitting, wonderfully so, with the Prometheus prequel, then I think most Aliens fans will fall over dead or start popping or something.

If you're a fan of the formula without any risk-taking, then I don't really recommend this novel. If you like all the basic premises, the action ramp-up, AND like playing around with the core ideas in a really freakishly horrible twist, then I totally recommend this novel.

It's a natural progression of claustrophobic horror and action film, adding a scouring take-down of both capitalism and communism. It even takes it much further than Aliens 4 with all the genetic weirdness. Indeed, it establishes that weirdness and just flies with it.

But then, I'm a big fan of alternate realities, even if it's an alternate reality of a fictional universe, so take what I say with a grain of xenomorph. :)

The tale of the troubled development of the second Alien sequel is well documented and probably just as interesting as the movie we ended up getting. It’s a tale of hirings and firings and grandiose concepts that gradually became more and more compromised — for those interested, there’s a lot of documentary info out there but a good place to start is with actor Ralph Brown’s blogs on the making of the film.
But long before it even got to that stage — long before the prima donna-ish hell shoots and the revolving door of directors — an early starting point for the movie’s development was a 1987 script by cyberpunk author William Gibson. And while it was never filmed, this script has had something of a long creative life in its own right, and not just as a footnote in one of the many, many tales of Hollywood development hell. It has already seen life as a graphic novel adaptation and an Audible audio version has been available for many years.
But Pat Cadigan’s novelisation is perhaps this particular story’s natural home. The screenplay itself is packed full of brilliant and innovative ideas — some of which have made it into the subsequent movies, as you’d expect from a writer like Gibson, but at the same time it’s easy to see why it never made it to screen. Aside from the near-absence of the character of Ripley throughout the story lacks the powerful forward momentum need for a movie like this. It’s too diffused; there are too many characters and too many locations. In short, it has rather more of the structure of a novel rather than a screenplay.
Cadigan is a very good choice for the adaptation too. I’ve been a fan of her work ever since coming across her in Mirrorshades, a cyberpunk short-story anthology from the mid-80s, of which her story Rock On was a highlight for me. Not only does she have a long body of original SF work, but she’s also adept in the cyberpunk subgenre (if that, indeed, is how we should describe it) and so she’s guaranteed to be sympathetic to Gibson’s original vision. She has a lot of experience in the area of SF/fantasy tie-ins into the bargain and has oodles of experience of taking others’ work, often from entirely different media, and turning them into a slick reading experience.
If anything, the novel could have stood a little more experimentation, I think. As mentioned above, there are elements which have found their way into other films in the franchise. The black sludge that the xenomorphs have evolved to speed reproduction seems similar to that seen in the Prometheus pre/sequels and I couldn’t help but feel that the character of Colonel Rosetti was some kind of close relation to Dan Hedaya’s General Perez from Alien Resurrection.
However, there are other ideas that fell by the wayside from the original script that could have been delved into further. Primary for me among these were the sequences on Rodina Station, an outpost of United Progressive Peoples. It’s understandable why this might have been dropped at the time, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR making the idea of a Soviet enclave in space somewhat dated. But I think there’s a case to be made to view the Alien franchise as retro SF anyway. Maybe not originally, but it’s become a vision of the future that’s embedded in a late 20th century late industrial view of human civilisation rather than a 21st century digital, transhuman one. Nowhere is this more obvious than in what I’d view as the most successful post-Aliens entry in the franchise, the 2014 survival videogame Alien Isolation, which very much traded on the nostalgic late-1970s interior designs of HR Geiger and Ron Cobb, among others.
It would have been nice to have had more of the book set on Rodina and maybe have a deeper exploration of the Soviet base and people, perhaps as a counterpoint to the extreme gung-ho Colonial Marine antics of the second film. At the very least, as the story’s denouement relies on co-operation between the communist and capitalist protagonists, a little more from the Soviets might have been nice.
Another adjustment that could have been interesting would have been to develop some of the more tangential characters a bit further. For the purposes of the screenplay, it’s natural that the established characters — in this case, Hicks, Newt and Bishop — should be foregrounded but they didn’t strike me as the most interesting ones and with the extended scope of the novel, it would have been nice to see some of the potentially really quite interesting characters like Luc Hai and Spence get more development.
One slight niggle was the constant references to dialogue and even whole scenes from Aliens, usually within the reminisces of Hicks. I get that they’re a little piece of fan service and I could have lived with one or two but there were just too many of them for my liking and they ended up being rather intrusive, pulling us out of the story being told to remind us of one that’s long over.
But this is perhaps a rather petulant criticism because this is a novel very much for the fans and on that score it very much delivers. It’s a complete and faithful reimagining of Gibson’s screenplay and a tightly written SF adventure to boot that not only delivers the scares and thrills of the first two films but also manages to suffuse the story with some of Cadigan’s trademark wit and humour.

After the success of the first two Alien movies, the early nineties tried to replicate the success by continuing the franchise. We’d left Ripley escaping the alien invasion of colony LV-426 with the rescued child, Newt, and the one remaining marine, Hicks, after blowing the stowaway alien queen out of an airlock. Where to take these survivors, and how to progress that story?

Sadly, Alien 3 the movie was not particularly well received, but now we can find out just how different it all could have been as sci-fi queen Pat Cadigan writes a novelisation of William Gibson’s draft for the screenplay, one of the many that wasn’t used at the time.

The first thing that struck me about this book is that – unlike all of the Alien movies – it doesn’t follow Ripley. Perhaps that’s one big reason they didn’t use it. Instead, this is primarily Hicks’ story, so probably best prepared for that. It’s not a bad decision, it just feels like missed opportunity to go with arguably the more interesting character.

In tone, things are more Aliens (action) than Alien (horror), and while there are moments of creepiness, the sense of claustrophobia that runs through the whole movie series didn’t quite make it onto the page. And hate to say it, but action works better in visual formats.

The story itself is not too surprising, and fits perfectly with what fans already know about this universe – more or less. I wasn’t quite sure about the continued evolution of the aliens themselves: it did seem a bit too much change too fast, and I’ve never liked the baffling logic of either their creation or lifecycle, never mind when that gets mixed up again here. I did find myself wondering how much of the subsequent movies – e.g. Prometheus and Covenant – altered/expanded this recent novelisation of the older screenplay. Certainly, I think I spotted a few veiled covid references, hardly surprising for a book written during lockdown, and rather appropriate to the topic in hand.

The other thing that I spotted a bit too much off was references back to the movie. One or two: great. Repeatedly? Got tiresome and also made the characters so much flatter as they only referenced events from this one, albeit traumatic, period. I also caught the same phrases – e.g. something about things never being just once – being used by several characters, which flattened the cast into a slightly amorphous blob at times.

Overall, this was an entertaining enough read, and intriguing as a fan of the movie series to see where it could have gone. However, it doesn’t do anything quite interesting enough with the story to make it a must read, even if you are a fan.

EH.

As someone who enjoys the ALIEN franchise, and thankfully has only fully retained the memories and or watched Alien and Aliens, I was excited to get a chance at reading the un-produced screenplay for film 3. The ALIEN 3 film was tonally different than the first two and I just stopped caring and didn't make it through Alien 4.

I will say this - the world-building for the Alien franchise is a juggernaut in itself. You have greedy and slimy corporations working behind the scenes which could be another franchise in of itself.

This book picks up 4 years from the events from the 2nd film. If you go in thinking that NEWT and Ripley are returning to kick alien ass, no, sadly. They get shuffled off - Newt to her grandparents on Earth, Ripley back to her job/colony to heal from the wounds inflicted from the second film. So this story is all about Hicks and Bishop. WHICH IS NOT A BAD thing.

What this book suffers from is the inability to really let us understand what exactly is going on with the alien and the government. We know the government is shady, we know they are looking for some type of 'weapon' to assist them... it backfires when we find out that the blood and or the 'infection' of the xenomorph causes people to literally turn into xenomorphs themselves. (Like their body sheds its skin and out comes a xenomorph.) The connections and the reasoning behind how this happened wasn't explained enough, and it's hard to tell if it was the fault of the writer or the screenplay (since it was only a first draft).

I don't regret reading this book, but I do wish that the plot we got equaled to the amazing action scenes. ... and maybe Ripley and or Newt should have been in it.

This book is the perfect treat for all Alien fans!
Based on an unproduced screenplay by William Gibson, Pat Cadigan spins a xenomorph-filled tale that starts with Ripley, Newt, Bishop and Hicks drifting into a protected area of space (rather than ending up on the prison planet, as seen in the movie Aliens 3)
They are taken in the Union of Progressive Peoples border protection team. Ripley, unfortunately, remains comatose throughout the story, but Newt, Hicks and Bishop star, with Hicks leading, which I thoroughly enjoyed as Hicks was a great character to lead from after the movie, Aliens (the sequel to Alien)
Pat Cadigan manages to add little snippets of thought from the characters we knew so well in the second movie, mainly shown through Hicks inner thoughts, as well as Bishop's. The author also sets the scenes and atmosphere perfectly for a xenomorph showdown, with an enjoyable pace that encourages the reader to keep turning the pages.
All in all, this was a thoroughly enjoyable novel! Perfect for fans of the Alien franchise and could also be read by those who nothing about it, or who haven't seen the films.
Highly recommended!

The long-lost unproduced screenplay of Alien3 by William Gibson. The possible "greatness that could have been" instead of the good, but not great, movie sequel we got. This sounded like it would be a slam-dunk, homerun of a novel. I so wanted to love it. But, alas, it also ended up being good, but not great. I'm not sure if the original screenplay was a fully fleshed out one and the translation to novel form by another author 30 years on was the issue, or if the source material wasn't fully realized and too many gaps had to be filled in, or if the problems lay somewhere in between. I also found, especially in the early going of the story, the cadence of the narrative was just off. Until the more climactic parts toward the end of the story I had a hard time establishing a smooth reading rhythm. I'm not sure if that's due to Gibson's original writing or Cadigan's adaptation.
Rather than looking at it as the sequel we almost got, if instead the novel is treated as more of an Alien "alternate universe" or fan fiction, it can be enjoyed a bit more. There were some original, different, and at times totally cray-cray ideas, and arguably more action than even Aliens. However, there were some ridiculously crazy concepts and political/social commentaries that made it utterly unviable as a movie (although I still question if all those ideas were in the actual screenplay or added by Cadigan). It's not a bad book by any means, and diehard Aliens or Sci-Fi action fans may have an easier time sitting back and just enjoying those aspects of the novel.
I wouldn't rate it as high as 4*, but I'd call it somewhere between 3-3.5*.

DNF at 13%.

I was pretty damn excited to read the novelization of the unproduced William Gibson screenplay for Alien 3, but author Pat Cadigan is striking too many tonally dissonant notes for me to enjoy this. She seems to be writing for camp, and the tongue-in-cheek, self-referential vibe of her style here is not something I'm enjoying. I knew I was in troubled waters when Ripley is introduced to us as a crazy cat-lady, but things grew even more tremulous after Hicks is awakened from cold-sleep. Our introduction to him is as a disillusioned veteran hellbent on going rouge could have been interesting. Instead, it presents another instance for Cadigan to crack wise, writing about Hicks looking at his hospital bed pillows and thinking, "Next week he was going to rip the tags off those suckers with his bare hands. And if he couldn't, then he'd take off and nuke them from orbit. It was the only way to be sure."

Frankly, five chapters under my belt, this affair is just too cutesy and reads more like William Gibson's Alien 3 by way of Mad Magazine. To top it off, although we never received the fabled Alien 3 movie that could have been, the Gibson script has been adapted previously and in much better fashion. Take, for instance, the Alien III Audible Original Drama starring Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen, reprising their iconic roles of Hicks and Bishop, respectively. Or the five-part miniseries from Dark Horse Comics adapting William Gibson's Alien 3. For Alien fans who may have missed those, Cadigan's venture may suffice, if they can look past the irritating, spoofy writing style. Personally, I'd recommend either of these other two adaptations over this, with Audible's adaptation being the superior version and the closest we're likely ever going to get to a cinematic edition.

I love love love Alien. From the age of about 14-20, the Alien films made up about 40% of my personality at any given moment. So when I saw that this book existed- the novel version of the original Alien 3 that was never produced- I was beyond excited. I didn't dislike Alien 3 but I always felt that it was a missed opportunity and never really saw the point of having Newt, Bishop, and Hicks survive all of Aliens just to die before discovery in Alien 3. I went into this hoping that it would address and fix some of the things that I disliked in the movie but it didn't. I wanted to love this book so badly and I ended up struggling to get through it.

I am fully aware that for me this is a personal preference. It is very well written and I can see how the storyline would be very compelling for many readers, it just isn't what I enjoy in sci-fi. I was disappointed at the lack of Ripley, she was barely in this at all (same with Newt), personally, I think Ripley is, in a large way what makes an Alien story an Alien story and so her not being a focus in this disappointed me but I do understand the choice to sideline her for a bit. Out of the pre-existing characters the focus is primarily on Bishop and Hicks (both of whom I do enjoy as characters) and whilst their story-arcs are fairly interesting I just connect or feel as invested as I should have been. Also, the introduction of a LOT of new characters was pretty distracting. In the first chapters especially there were just too many new perspectives thrown in too fast and I struggled to keep up with the switching between them and it was hard to care about all of them as there were just too many all at once.

Overall I can see the appeal of this novel but it just wasn't for me.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an Arc of this in exchange for an honest review.

The story of how this novel came to be is almost as good as how it ended up.

Many, many moons ago — back in 1987 to be precise — William Gibson was tapped to be the first of what turned out to be ten writers to tackle the script for what was to become the third film in Ripley Scott’s Alien franchise. Gibson ultimately produced a second revision, in 1988, which toned down the story a bit, but the studio still passed on it.

This second revision was adapted into a comic series by Dark Horse Comics in 2018, and an audio drama in 2019 by Audible Studios, but the first revision remained in the dark aside from being passed around the internet on Alien fandom sites and message boards.

Now, in 2021, it sees the proper novelization it deserves; and from the Queen of Cyberpunk herself, Pat Cadigan.

To say that I was excited to read this book is an understatement. I have been a fan of both Gibson and Cadigan since I was a mere kid, and this is exactly the “peanut butter in my chocolate” type of collaboration that I dream about.

This story is gritty as all hell. Focusing largely on Hicks and Bishop after being “rescued” with Ripley and Newt in the Sulaco where they ended up at the conclusion of Aliens, this version of Alien 3 goes from “Ehhh, things might be ok.” to “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” to “Oh yeah, everything is totally screwed.”

We see a whole lot of evolution in the Xenomorphs in this story. Their adaptation and speedy evolution is both terrifying and, for franchise fans, fascinating given the total lore that already exists. These bugs are a total game changer when it comes to their propagation and swarm-like spread.

Through it all, however, we see the laser-focused persistence of Hicks and Bishop. Naturally, as should always be in an Alien story, there is some thinly-veiled political intrigue, and the ever-present idiocy of “The Company” to help push the story along a bit.

What’s striking about this book is that it is a total redirection of the bigger story. Ripley is probably in it for about two chapters before everything gets focused on the Artificial Person and the Marine. I applaud the change, and how a lot of material and memories from Aliens was referenced to give some extra sparkle to the situation the two find themselves in.

Ms. Cadigan tackled this project just perfectly. There are some scantly disguised references to the current COVID-19 pandemic that I found rather amusing, but the bigger story really lends itself to that kind of comparison. Being a fan of her previous writings, falling into a cadence and rhythm that I’m familiar with really helped churn through the pages. The dialogue encompasses so many damn emotions, but nothing ever gets to a point where the broader picture is derailed for lack of detail or cohesiveness.

All-in-all, this was one hell of a novel to read, and I’m both incredibly happy I got to enjoy it, and very sad that I’m done with it. I really, really, really hope this sees the screen someday. If only so I can see some Xenomorph lemurs. Oh yeah, there are lemurs.

Alien 3 by Pat Cadigan(From unproduced screenplay by William Gibson)- This is a novelization of an Alien franchise movie that was never produced. William Gibson wrote the screenplay then went on to continue writing the ground-breaking science fiction he is famous for. There are a lot of undeveloped screenplays out there, but this one needed to come to light, even in book form if not on the screen. Pat Cadigan, also a cyberpunk legend, turned it into a novel, and here you have it. It's nothing like the Alien 3 you saw at the movies, and for some that might be a good thing.
The story involves the recovery of the lifeboat, with Hicks, Newt, Ripley and the artificial person Bishop(well half of him) taken to a large space station. Of course, stupid humans ignore all pleas from the survivors and decide to test this alien life form, with terror as and death as a result. Newt is packed on a ship heading out, and Ripley is in a coma, so it's up to Corporal Hicks and Bishop(with a new set of legs), to lead a band of survivors across the slowly disintegrating station, once again to a lifeboat. Aliens pop up everywhere and there is yet another new strain.
The book is fast-paced and very tense. References to the second Alien movie "Aliens" are sprinkled throughout the book in the form of reminiscences by Hicks and Bishop. If you like this franchise, you might enjoy this book.

The tangled history of this project is something of a lesson is development hell. This is one of (many, many) screenplays of Alien3 which were never produced. It's hard to know whether it would have made a better film than the weird prison-planet version which eventually made it to screen.

This completely jettisons Ripley - she was to appear in its sequel - and gives us a much larger cast to get eviscerated. There are some not-overly compelling sub-plots about how evil the Weyland-Yutani Corporation are, and how brave socialist outcasts are fighting for a better universe - but it's mostly an exercise in splatter gore.

Much like a Doctor Who episode, there's lots of running through corridors. And, around every corner waits yet another facehugger ready to pounce. It fulfils all of the tropes you expect - things dripping down walls, grim terrors creeping up on our fearless heroes, and shady corporate types.

There were a few too many callbacks to the previous movie - which I found a little repetitive. Almost like the book wanted to convince the reader that it was a legitimate part of the franchise. The inevitable countdown to destruction loses some of its tension when you can see exactly how many pages there are left.

But it is good horror fun. Gore and slime aplenty and some nice little sci-fi touches. It's also interesting for fans of the franchise to see which bits of it seemed to make it into Alien Resurrection.

And a special shout out to the typesetting! It has some gorgeous eBook fonts - it makes such a difference having the interface text being presented as text rather than an image. It's no Typeset In The Future - but it is a welcome surprise.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is released later this year and is available to pre-order now.