Alien: Isolation The Novel Bursting January 2019!

[SM]

Spoiler

Because they issued SO937 and lost a ship, payload and crew.

[close]

[Xenomrph]

Spoiler

Then why wait 57 years to formally investigate a planetoid said to be so small it can do an entire rotation in a few hours?

[close]

The second half of that sentence is demonstrably false, but that's neither here nor there.

To answer the question, SM basically said it:

Spoiler

Doing so would be tantamount to admitting to major corporate malfeasance resulting in the disappearance of an expensive ship and her crew. Even if the perpetrator didn't get in legal trouble, I suspect they'd be on thin ice within the company for sending an expensive ship on an unconfirmed boondoggle with nothing to show for it. No one would want to admit to that, better to cut their losses and write the whole thing off.

57 years later, Ripley shows up and gives testimony that there's something worth investigating, and even then the inquest hearing thinks she's full of shit. It takes Burke making a unilateral decision for anything to even get done, and even then that's because there were colonists present who could go check things out. If the planet were uninhabited, I doubt anything further would have come of it.

[close]

[TheBATMAN]

Spoiler

Its not false at all when it comes directly from a script.

Secondly, thats utter tosh considering the extremes the company would go to to procure a specimen. There are all manner of ways the company could investigate LV426 without revealing special order 937. They could send a team there covertly, completely unrelated to what happened to the Nostromo. This very idea seems to be what Alex White alludes to in the Cold Forge. Waiting another 42 years for Ripley to show up makes absolutely zero sense if the company knew exactly where the xenomorph came from all along, which is now what the Isolation novel suggests. No sense at all.

[close]

[Xenomrph]

Its not false at all when it comes directly from a script.

It's false when the movie itself disproves it on multiple levels. For a planet with a rotation of a couple hours, it's extremely coincidental that every exterior shot across two movies shows the same lighting conditions at all times, even though a rotational period that fast would mean the light would be changing by the minute.

Context matters - it's a line spoken by a fallible human being reading a monitor, and the very next person to speak is incredulous that it could be that small, especially given its apparent gravity. Just because a character speaks something doesn't automatically make it gospel truth.

This is all pretty off-topic, but it was worth pointing out for anyone else reading.

Re: the topic at hand,

Spoiler

You're right that the more Alien encounters happen between 'Alien' and 'Aliens', the less sense 'Aliens' makes. You can come up with ways to explain it (which is what SM and I are trying to do), but those explanations aren't airtight and aren't going to work for everybody - 'Aliens' wasn't written with a bunch of intermediate spin-off stories in mind, after all.

Special Order 937 is about procuring a specimen, but the Company didn't know what that actually was - they were just homing in on a signal of nonhuman origin. The result of that endeavor ends up being not just a total bust, but a colossal financial loss by way of the Nostromo and its cargo.

The Nostromo's flight recorder gets recovered, giving them another lead. Meanwhile, the signal from the Derelict gets switched off. The Company literally buys a space station only to, once again, walk away with less than nothing when the station gets destroyed almost immediately after they buy it.

You can count the events of "Alien: Blackout" if you want, too, where the same thing happens all over again.

Irrespective of the increasing risk of the public or the authorities catching wind of the egregious corporate malfeasance, at one point or another the people making these kinds of decisions are going to cut their losses.

The "real" answer is that writing a narrative set in between two other narratives is hard - you have to balance having appropriate "stakes" and "revelations" to make the story interesting and justify its existence, but at the same time you risk compromising their narratives. 'Out of the Shadows' had the same problem except that it went in the other direction. Rather than derailing 'Aliens', 'Out of the Shadows' nullified itself by having Ripley forget the whole thing. That doesn't mean it doesn't have neat characters doing neat stuff or that it's not worth experiencing, of course.

[close]

[Still Collating...]

TheBATMAN

Spoiler

I remember the game's story and dialog very well, played it recently. Never is it stated that Taylor knew where the alien came from, nor is it really implied she knew anything about the creature before she found out about it on the station. After she does, of course she wants to take it back or any info on it available, that's when she strikes a deal with Marlow.

And what the hell? Blond hair and purple droids?

[close]

[Hudson]

Started the book today, about 50 pages in. So far so good. 

[Stitch]

Having finished it, now, I think it's very much OK. It made me just want to play the game instead of reading about it, because that's a better experience.

I didn't like the characterisation of young Amanda, and I didn't like how the whole eleventh birthday thing was handled. It feels like the author picked up on the wrong point of the line in the film to me. It's a valid interpretation, but it felt off. My interpretation is that in Aliens the point was Ellen would be back by Amanda's birthday, and the fact it was her eleventh was to stress just how much time had passed and how she'd missed her daughter's entire life. The book makes the whole thing about it being her eleventh birthday, and it feels forced to me.

The added backstory of Ellen Ripley I quite liked, and it felt mostly true to character. There wasn't much of it, but it was decent.
There's a mention of Ash, which I'm not sure fits the established timeline, but I might be wrong.

The mention of Zula didn't really add much to the narrative. In fact, most of the additional backstory didn't add much to the narrative, and that's the book's real problem.
It's a brief adaptation of a 10-15 hour very intense video game, with additional, mostly superfluous, backstory. Where the game felt very tense, the novel seems to skip right over it. The alien itself barely seems to appear in the novel and I don't recall one instance of hiding in a locker. I think the biggest problem is has is that it's completely lacking any tension.

It's very much OK.

[Hudson]

About 150 pages in. The Zula stuff is really extra. The lengthy flashback chapter that cuts into the breakfast convo with Taylor is slow. I'm digging adaptations of gameplay but some of it feels like it's taking too much time with descriptions of opening doors and climbing around. I think we can afford to gloss over even more of that.

On the fence about the inclusion of the computer logs between chapters. It's neat but they feel like mere interruptions so far because from a POV perspective there's no indication (at the part I'm at so far) that Amanda or anyone is actually reading these logs.

EDIT:

About halfway through. Again, I think the flashback chapters really slow the pace of the main narrative because everything comes to a halt, but they're interesting I guess. I think they could probably be more concise, especially when you have to get through two in a row. It's working as a sequel to the first film so far. And yes it is giving me that urge to install the game and give it another play through probably when I finish reading.

[HuDaFuK]

About two chapters shy of finishing. As others have already said, it's good enough but not amazing. Generally speaking, the gameplay sections are a tad weak while the plot-progressing sections and flashbacks are stronger. My main gripe is probably that, for a book about one of the most terrifying Alien experiences of recent years, there's really not a lot of Aliens in it. So far I think Amanda's bumped into an Alien about three times in the entire novel, and even those encounters were incredibly brief and basically consisted of her seeing it and then immediately running away. I don't even recall her meeting an adult Alien in the hive, and that was one of the most frantic sequences of the entire game.

I was also really hoping it might include some tangents that expanded on things on Sevastopol we didn't see in the game, like events involving other characters prior or simultaneous to Amanda's arrival - while one early interlude got my hopes up in this regard, sadly it was essentially devoid of any of that kinda thing, which I thought was a shame. Not only could it have been interesting, it would've allowed DeCandido to be a bit more original and expansive.

Other little gripes/observations:

• The Joes are purple, for no logical reason.
• The inclusion of some of the game's archive logs between chapters was a nice touch.
• Ripley sure loves her bottled water!
• I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure elements of Ellen Ripley's expanded backstory tie up with Ridley Scott's original behind the scenes notes for the character, which was again a nice touch.
• If Creative Assembly had a crib sheet for all their characters, DeCandido clearly didn't get it, because almost all of the expanded names he comes up with contradict the names or initials given in the game. (I'm aware no one but a nerd like me will even notice this.)

Spoiler

I certainly don't remember this memo in the game but I never found all the audio logs so I could have missed it.

[close]

Spoiler

It wasn't in the game. A few of the later archive logs are original, that one included.

[close]

[Hudson]

Nice touch on the Ripley backstory synching with the Alien production notes. I think I recognized some of the names of the ships she served on.

Also, Amanda's hair is described as blond?

[Samhain13]

The Joes are purple, for no logical reason.

THANOS!

[Still Collating...]

I don't get it when problems like these arise. Just like in River of Pain when the movie dialog and scenes were done wrongly, how can this happen? Who watches bits of Isolation and goes: yep, the droids are purple and Amanda is blonde, I hope it's not just the lighting...

[Samhain13]

I don't get it when problems like these arise.

Some writers don't do their research. Its not like Fox/Disney cares whenever they do or not anyway.

Could have been worse. He could have given the purple to Amanda's hair.

Who watches bits of Isolation and goes: yep, the droids are purple and Amanda is blonde, I hope it's not just the lighting...

Maybe he just googled stuff and came across fanart of purple working joes.

[Corporal Hicks]

It does feel like he hasn't actually played the game. I associate intense fear and panic with Isolation, and there's just none of that in here. It's like he didn't experience it for himself.

[Samhain13]

Heck he didn't even had to play it. Wasn't this what the alien isolation digital series was for? That would have been enough to avoid such errors.