I've made a bit more headway on the book, here's my latest thoughts and findings.
The chestburster page calls attention to not all chestbursters being the same - some have forelimbs while others don't, and some are born with limbs fully formed, which seems to be talking about at least 'Alien3', if not 'Alien: Covenant'. It's kind of neat to see a book acknowledge this, as not many books do.
After that is the augmented reality stuff. I happen to think AR as a concept is pretty neat, and while my only "screen" is an iPhone (which sort of limits the impact versus, say, a tablet), the AR in the book is pretty well executed. I think I had the most fun with the weapon simulators. Worth noting that the AR image you scan is of a pulse rifle from 'Aliens: Colonial Marines', although the AR weapon you interact with is a movie pulse rifle. Another weapon you can mess with is the M5 RPG Launcher, an 'Aliens: Colonial Marines' weapon (although it is mentioned in the Colonial Marines Tech Manual as well).
A close second is probably the facehugger dissection, that was pretty well done, too. The Alien Queen AR was pretty neat, it gives you the ability to scale the AR Queen up to "life size". I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it is pretty damn huge.
On the page immediately following the AR stuff, there's another of David's bestiary drawings from Covenant. The caption reads: "After collecting samples of alien specimens for research and data, 'David', a synthetic onboard the USCSS Prometheus in 2089 recorded his notes and sketches."
The book is
really committed to the idea that David made these sketches onboard the Prometheus, prior to the bulk of the movie's events (in 2093).
The first page of the Sulaco ('Aliens') chapter dates the film as having taken place in 2122. Whoops!
Also, the chapter repeatedly refers to the Sulaco as the "USCSS Sulaco" as opposed to the "USS Sulaco"; I mean, it's not like it was written on the side of the ship or anything. The chapter gets the name right once, otherwise it screws it up every time.
The first page of the chapter has a really weirdly-worded recap of the events of 'Aliens' - it brings up the Marines' intention to get airlifted back to the Sulaco and nuke the site from orbit, but the way it's worded, it's as if the Marines actually did that. Only halfway through the subsequent paragraph does the recap get back on track and describe the events of the film following the Dropship crash. Like, it's really bizarrely worded and more than a little confusing. The page does call attention to Ripley and co's "inadequate" sweep for surviving Alien threats prior to going back into hypersleep, though.
Worth noting is one of the image captions on the next page: for an image of the Sulaco's hypersleep pods, the caption reads, "Crew's travel to LV-426 was disturbed during hypersleep in capsules." I genuinely don't know what this is referring to.
The next two pages are about "key personnel", and this is where shit starts getting really crazy. It mis-spells Bishop's name as, I shit you not, "Úbishopi". I think someone forgot to do a little proofreading. And that's the least crazy thing in this section. The characters who get little paragraphs are Ripley, Newt, Hicks, Burke, Hudson, Vasquez, Bishop, and... Weirzbowski, of all people (but we'll get to him in a second). No other characters get mentioned.
Hicks' section gets a direct callout to the events of 'Aliens: Colonial Marines', referencing the USS Sephora and USS Legato by name and claiming that he may have survived the events of the movie 'Aliens', although this is "unconfirmed".
Weirzbowski's section also claims he may have survived the events of 'Aliens', stating that "uncorroborated reports suggest a subsequent career running covert black-ops for Weyland Yutani".
The next page is about the Sulaco, and funnily enough it features a screen capture from 'Aliens' where you can see the name of the ship on its side, and also cites a bunch of technical specs from the USCM Tech Manual, but then
still calls it the "USCSS Sulaco" anyway.
Most interesting thing on this page is a paragraph about the Sulaco's fate - it says reports of its demise are "contradictory", and gives a reference to the 'Aliens: Colonial Marines' version of events where it was destroyed after being damaged by the USS Sephora's explosion, but then also offers an alternate fate where the Sulaco was overrun by Aliens and lost somewhere between LV-426 and Foirina 161, a reference to the 'Aliens: Infestation' game for the Nintendo DS.
Like I said before, this is a weird f**kin' book.
The pervasiveness of references to 'Aliens: Colonial Marines' makes me wonder if this book originally started as some kind of tie-in to that game, but that the project stalled out and got delayed so much that its only just now getting published, and had some late-stage changes made to include 'Alien: Covenant' content. Even the bit about Weirzbowski's survival is a reference to one of the early plot ideas for A:CM if I remember right, before it was changed to Hicks.
After I finish reading it, I'm genuinely interested in contacting the book's author and picking their brain about the book. Like, the (lack of) editing and the sheer number of references to ancillary stuff like Concrete Jungle and Infestation make it feel like an unofficial fan book, but the overall production values of the visuals and presentation are more in line with an official publication - not to mention the 20th Century Fox copyright notice in the book's front matter.
