Quote from: Local Trouble on Oct 14, 2021, 06:35:02 AM
There's always the whole "BuRkE wAs LyInG" fallback that so many seem fond of employing.
The hoops people jump through to justify the canon conflicts in the stories of their favorite video games or books always amuse me.
A problem with your canonicity? Weyland Yutani is all-powerful and can control all flows of information, deploy waves of heavily armed mercenaries without fear of repercussions, control governments, etc. Burke seemed pretty resigned to the fact that he couldn't stop Hicks from nuking the colony from orbit, but everything else, Weyland Yutani could do that.
As far as this novel goes, it sounds pretty dumb. I know some people are far higher on the NuCanon of the Alien RPG, but it all feels like Call of Duty Innnn Spaaaace to me, disregarding the worldbuilding of the Aliens film of coldly calculating megacorporations and supremely bored Colonial Marines upset they never get in any stand-up fights (similar to any peacetime troops), and instead spending their down time talking about transgender space hookers and making fun of colonists. And I get it, for the purpose of video games and RPGs, you don't want your
players as bored as the Colonial Marines seemed to be. But when people start writing novels about these interstellar space wars in a late-stage capitalist dystopian future influenced by megacorporations, I have to stop to wonder if any of them have ever given much thought to how the very same economic and MAD drivers that have prevented open warfare between superpowers since the Korean War would still be in great effect in the future. Especially if everyone is still based on Earth, within ICBM range of one another. Do we have big guns, and and do grunts brag about them? Of course. I spent ten years in the US Marines, and we certainly never shot at any Chinese or Russians with them. Heck, the one time we fought a legitimate government, it was only because it posed almost no actual threat, and had no inter-continental strike capability.
Even using the unproduced scripts by William Gibson, his UPP were Space Soviets, locked in a Cold War with the unnamed Space America. This wasn't a setting where colonists got mysteriously slaughtered, like it's turn of the 20th century central Africa or something. Heck, colonial Africa wasn't even that violent between the European powers, because they didn't want major wars breaking out at home over distant parcels of land. The Fashoda Incident, for example, was specifically *not* a bigger incident, because the French realized they didn't want to be sandwiched in the middle between them and the Germans/Austro-Hungarians if a war broke out in Europe (WW1 broke out just 15 years later).
I dunno, Alien always seemed like cold, dystopic science fiction, not grandiose space opera. French colonists being slaughtered only to blame the Brits? What year is this set again?
I never give much thought to the plots of stuff like the AvP games, or Fireteam Elite. But if you're going to write a
novel where the words have to mean things and make sense, maybe put the smallest bit of thought into it.