Alien

After taking an interest in the Alien RPG I have been doing a bit of a dive into assorted Alien media over the last few weeks. I've been listening to audiobooks and reading novelisations with Kindle Unlimited and I've been reading old Dark Horse comics which I loved when I was a teenager.

Mostly it's all shit.

The audio play of William Gibson's Alien 3 is pretty good. Helped by the fact that Michael Biehn and Lance Henrickson voice Hicks and Bishop. It's only a couple hours long, I think it would have made a good film. Not sure it would have been better than the extended version of the Alien3 we did get though.

I listened to the audiobook of Alien: Covenant just to fill in that gap in my knowledge. It was pretty awful.

Aliens: Hive used to be one of my favourite Aliens comics. A tale of a scientist who builds an Alien android to infiltrate hives. It's alright but there's some stuff which just doesn't make sense and it's really brief.

The original Aliens comics which followed the stories of Ripley, Newt and Hicks do not hold up well. I suspect they were always shit.

From all of that noise though, I found an incredible original story called Alien: The Cold Forge. I listened to the audiobook and the narration is astounding. It's a familiar premise, a remote research station trying to harness the power of the aliens, until things inevitably fall apart, but it is so well put together. The star of the show is a piece of shit sociopathic auditor who revels in the power capitalism has given him over all the little people. He is horrific and I was transfixed by the way he just keeps on getting worse. It is the first piece of Alien media which I felt lived up to the first two films.