We have just uploaded the 186th episode of the Alien vs. Predator Galaxy Podcast (right-click and save as to download)! Corporal Hicks and RidgeTop are joined by recent addition to AvP Galaxy staff Still Collating… in his first recorded podcast (though we recorded and released a later episode), as well as returning community guest Sarah Evans, to talk about Aliens: Bishop from author T.R Napper!
We discuss our hesitation around the book due to Apone’s brother, the complexity of Bishop as a character and his fantastic portrayal with the book, the prescience of AI and impact upon industry, uploading consciousness, tangents about Chinese and Thai food and plenty more!
We have also recorded an interview with author T.R Napper so be sure to keep checking back in for the release of that episode!
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I'm pleased to see this one is doing well! I'd love to see it continued. :-)
"57 years..." 🤣
Another great podcast and glad to hear Sarah again! Hicks had me cracking up when he roasted himself for mistakenly calling praetorians patreons lol! But loved the discussion, made me want to give it another read!
" "Horror has a face in this universe, and you must make an ally of horror," he said. "For if you do not it will become an enemy to be feared. The Xenomorph embodies horror and moral terror, and therefore I will make the Xenomorph my friend. I will bend it to my will."
Exactly.
They keep saying these books are canon. But that makes no sense, allow me to explain.
So you have Cold Forge set just after Aliens, a secret WY facility, studying the aliens that apparently came from LV 426.
And in Bishop, also set just after Aliens, you have a guy who I'm going to guess is quite a high up official within WY, running around 161 trying to get Ripley, defecting to the Chinese and torturing his own robot design to find out information about the Alien.
Why not just reroute the Patna to the cold forge?
Oh no wait, your on a Chinese battleship, built by WY that has a purpose built cargo hold for Aliens that it just so happens is currently in possession of...f**king what?
WY deserved to be bought out by Walmart.
It's all starting to get silly. The more they do and the more characters friends/lovers/siblings keep showing up the worse it's getting.
Even when it's great, like Alien: Isolation, the inclusion of Amanda was clutching at straws at best.
WY was concerned about her and authorised her to go show she could get closure...f**k off.
But that's the least egregious example, these books are becoming a joke.
The book did leave the eggs coming from an unknown source. Just White has said outside the book as Hicks said he thought they came from LV-426. Which is silly.
The current Titan run is trying to fit into movie continuity but ends up with Alien stockpiles being researched concurrently with the movies with no explanation.
He could be seeding places himself. DAVID MASTERMIND VILLIAN OF THE EU.
But this has always been the way it was in the EU. The Aliens are just places. Even AvP2 which has a pretty big lore taking places over multiple years on lv1201 never chiefly tells you where the Aliens come from, they are just there. You don't know if the Preds brought them, if the Jockey's brought them, or if this is supposed to be the Alien homeworld. It is never explicitly explained. At least that I can remember. The Galaxy is a 180,000 light years across. It really doesn't bother me that they find a highly adaptable alien species on other worlds without having to explain it every time.
I know back in the fanfiction days when I wrote in the Alien verse it was an idea I never gave much credence to because the Aliens are just everywhere. Granted I always wrote from an EU perspective vs a movie one. I WOULD want it more explained in the movie verse just because we have an established narrative of why the Aliens are so hard to come by thanks to Res but in the EU, never bothered me.
They did. But when we spoke to them for our podcast, they said if push came to shove they thought the eggs came from the Derelict.
Having worked for the military and U.K./U.S government myself in the past, I can buy that.
And I let it slide with cold forge.
But it's every single bloody novel.
Bishop revolves around Bishop human effectively coercing/torturing Bishop android for information about Xenos. Whilst on a ship full of Alien eggs.
Where did they come from?
Who knows.
Who cares.
Hey nerds, don't worry about actual plot, look, it's Apones brother. Time to get your special sock out. We know how you all love the film Aliens. And the question that everyone has on their mind with this franchise of "what's the deal with Australia." Well fans, questions will be answered.
Don't even get me started on uncivil war.
Question for you mate, where are all the eggs coming from. Everyone seems to have them, from secret government facilities, Chinese military and even an infected one hidden in a secret floor compartment. All of it with zero explanation.
Why are there aliens everywhere?
Why does almost every planet have an engineer temple and an abandoned WY facility at it.
I feel like I'm missing something.
I found all Titan's video game tie-ins (Isolation, Infiltrator & Predator: Stalking Shadow) to be quite mid, but nothing bad. For me, it's been the more recent (last 2 or 3 years specifically) where they've really faltered and been more bad and mid then usual. Colony War was just awful. Genuinely terrible. The kind of quality of DH Press at its worse. I can't even make it past the first 20 pages of AvP Rift War. Vasquez was quite mid, as was Enemy of My Enemy.
The only Titan books I've enjoyed recently have been Inferno's Fall (which has some of the EU's best character building and development) and this, Aliens: Bishop. I also really enjoyed both anthologies: Ultimate Prey and Eyes of the Demon, though I acknowledge that I am a little biased there as I worked on them. But I also think the quality of the shorts in them wasn't as consistently good as If It Bleeds.
But more to the point of the thread, I really did enjoy Bishop. I went into it very hesitant based on the synopsis but I was pleasantly surprised at how well written. Don't get me wrong, I'm a nerd, so I had nitpicks with it, but over all I thought it was a fantastic return to that solid form.
I was a HUGE Bantam guy and Dark Horse guy (the comics) back in the day, so the EU has always been in my blood just like the movies were. I had no issue seperating the two out though. To me, DH was always its own thing, the games were their own thing, and the movies were there own thing. So DH going wild and the following bantam novelizations of said comics never bothered me.
I think Marvel and (whoever da fuk) writes the novels for them suffer from trying to make things too serious and bleak. Most of them have a very try hard feel to them imo.
I do like White as an author. Think that when White's stuff releases it's more in tune with the way the universe works than most others in the new EU. That said, I was actually only mild to cold forge but think that having that story helped NAIL Charybdis.
But lots of the other stuff is definitely a miss. Despite thinking the alternate Alien 3s had potential on celluloid, I couldn't even finish the Gibson's Alien 3 novelization. I have one where it has a bunch of legacy characters from the movies and from the EU but never made it a couple of pages in. Lots of people like the one where they are trapped in a feudal age of tech because of the Aliens, but I couldn't dig it.
The comics have been bleak. There is little to like in most of them, though I did like aspects of the ones where the androids were the main characters on the radioactive world. It had some cool art, and the story was very much old EU more akin to the DH stuff. But it still suffered from HAVING to reference the new movies, so things like the black goo morphing people are present.
The last true Alien comic series I liked was the first Zulu Hendricks series, and that was only the first half of said series. Started well, but failed toward the end imo, but still a good overall story.
What is weird to me though, is I almost always like media that nobody else does in a series. I will like well liked stories others have liked to be sure, but I can see myself liking this story, just the way that yall are always talking shit about it.
Back in the day I liked the Earth War comics, and I also liked Stronghold before everybody figured out it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously. I also liked the old Colonial Marines comics. I realize it was a terrible overall Aliens story, and it has several of my own pet peeves in it, but there was more I liked than I didn't like.
Lots of it will boil down to your own personal preference.
I also wonder if they aren't mandated as authors to try and force every single familial connection, every reference point, etc into their work by Dibney. Since if you look at SW and Marvel that shit makes it into a tons of series they do, and movies they do.
What is the main problem then. Why are these books so bad?
Nah. If you ask me, the RPG is the main thing that the Alien franchise has going for it (aside from Romulus, natch).
I do agree that the novels have suffered from referencing the RPG constantly, though; I was looking forward to Uncivil War for that reason, but even that sucks, so I don't think dependency on the RPG is even the main problem.
I didn't think so.
I wanted to like this book, but the audio was like nails on a chalk board in places and the story itself was utter fan w**k.
Someone, someday, is going to write a really great, original and atmospheric Alien book that just stands on its own without the need to reference anything from whatever this poxy f**king RPG thing is that has just poisoned everything.
No.
Podcast review it up!