Yeah I was really looking forward to the book, and the USCM Tech Manual is pretty much the gold standard of "in universe tie-in books" for any franchise ever. It's just chock full of content from cover to cover, and the level of detail is mind-blowing. I got Lance Henriksen to sign my copy on the page about Artificial Persons (he wrote "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid") and he couldn't stop saying "Holy shit, is this a real book? This is real. This is a real book" as he paged through it.
And the Tech Manual absolutely deserves a reaction like that.
The WY Report was an amazing opportunity for something similar, but even broader in scope (covering 5 movies instead of 1) and from a different perspective. Tons of opportunities for clever corporate double-speak, expansion on ideas presented in the movies, creative ways of presenting information (or not presenting information, if the book had chosen to be strict in what the Company did or didn't know), all kinds of stuff.
There's a ton of information presented that, if the book were handled "realistically" as an in-universe document, the Company shouldn't know, or at least the book doesn't really go into detail about how it knows what it knows. Why not include a bit about a "debriefing" of the Bishop android after the Company salvages him on Fury 161? That could have been cool as heck.
The book flat-out says WY salvaged the Auriga's AI, but then doesn't have any sort of transcripts of that AI saying or doing anything. Seeing Father's reactions to the chaos happening onboard the ship could have been really cool.
Just the way things are presented is really inconsistent. Even 'Star Beast', allegedly an excerpt from a larger book, isn't presented as an excerpt. Like, the 8 pages straight up summarize the entirety of 'Alien3', while providing no insight into any of the characters or the events going on. If that's the excerpt, and it covers literally the entire movie, how long was the whole book? Is the excerpt just the introduction, and then the rest of 'Star Beast' is reiterating the introduction in greater detail? It's not made clear.
And then the Alien3 chapter has the gall to say, "not much useful information was gained from the Fury 161 incident", while having entire pages devoted to repetitive artwork, and the Bishop salvage getting a one-line mention. Like, seriously?
Or the Resurrection chapter being a nearly barren wasteland of information (other than half-disguised snark at how inept the USM is), and then including multiple references to information WY is apparently "going to get" in the near future after they get more data from the USM. That felt like the biggest cop-out ever, that's the kind of stuff you put in a book like this if there's a new movie on the horizon and you don't want to reveal spoilers or have your book be contradicted. Like, it made sense in the Prometheus chapter when dealing with David and Shaw, but not with the Resurrection chapter, where there are no new movies on the horizon that the book could spoil. It felt like a lazy excuse to not include more content, but then rub it in the reader's face that "there totally is more content forthcoming once we get those files from the USM!".
Even the "Alien applications" chapter is a swing and a miss, when 80% of the "applications" are literally "ways to combat more xenomorphs" (and a couple of them don't make sense). Using Alien biology to fight Aliens really isn't expanding human knowledge or practical applications for everyday life.
Quote from: SM on May 01, 2016, 06:05:45 AM
In regards to the prisoners, you'll note the heading says 'Notable staff and inmates' - emphasis on the notable.
The reason there were big pictures of the Sulaco and dropship and big spreads of weapons - and indeed a large section of the book is given over to Prometheus, Alien and Aliens - is they're the most popular films, that even casual fans might be drawn to.
It's not supposed to replace something like the great slabs of text in the CMTM, which wouldn't attract the casual fan. It's more a coffee table book and a completely different beast.
Sure it says "notable", but with the available space on the pages, why not include all 22 prisoners? For as "notable" as they're supposed to be, the ones that do get listed don't get enough information about them to show why they're notable and the other 5 aren't. One of them doesn't even warrant a photo for some reason.
I was ecstatic when I got to those pages because I figured it would finally let me to faces to names for all the prisoners, because even I have trouble remembering who they all are or what they look like. Instead once I realized it didn't list everybody, I was left saying, "Wait, what the f**k?"
I get that Alien and Aliens draw the biggest crowds, but even those sections of the book were just regurgitations of the movie without anything interesting to offer. There's ways to appeal to both hardcore fans and casual fans, because the Tech Manual does it. It's got pretty (and amazingly detailed) pictures about all your favorite weapons and gear and vehicles from the movie, but expands on the movie in ways that are comprehensible to casual fans who have seen the movie and want to know more, and then also has lots of in-depth crazy shit to appeal to the hardcore crowd.
I'm just disappointed because even if it wasn't "intended" to be a companion piece to the CMTM, it absolutely could have been. It just feels like a massively missed opportunity.
