Alien 3 Novelization: Plot, Lore & Movie Differences

Alien 3 is a 1992 novel by Alan Dean Foster, published by Warner Books in June 1992, after the 1992 film opened on 22 May. It followed Ellen Ripley from a fire aboard the troop transport Sulaco to a crash on the Outer Veil work prison Fiorina. It was the third Alien book after Foster's 1979 Alien novelization and 1986 Aliens novelization.

Plot Summary

Four tubes left Acheron with the nearest full hospital about two years away. Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and what was left of Bishop slept while the Sulaco held their vitals. Hicks needed surgery the ship could not give him. Bishop did not dream, and the book treats that as a design choice the android regretted.

Four Sleepers

A Facehugger climbed Newt's cylinder and cracked the dome. A sliver of metallic glass went through the crawler, and its acid blood ate into Hicks's tube and through the deck. Klaxons and warning lights came on with nobody awake to hear them. Smoke poured from the hole while the dead crawler kept leaking onto Hicks's coffin.

The Sulaco warned that explosive gases were building in the cryogenic compartment. Ceiling fans pulled the mix, then something under the floor blew and yellow flame came up through the hole. The exhaust fans stopped. A nozzle like a small cannon doused the fire for a moment, then sparks killed the stream at the powerhead. Fire suppression and exhaust both went down.

The four working cylinders rose on hydraulic supports and crossed the room through smoke. The dead crawler slid off Hicks's tube and hit the deck. A female voice called a precautionary evacuation in one minute. The tubes ran a transport line to the starboard lock, where automatic handlers loaded them into one Emergency Escape Vehicle. They were the only occupants. Newt twitched behind her faceplate.

EEV Troubles

Ten EEVs left on a ten-second count, nine of them empty. At the same instant the gases in the damaged chamber mixed with the flames, and the fore port side of the Sulaco went up. Half the fleeing craft took a hard jolt. Two started tumbling. One empty EEV curved back and hit the transport at full acceleration near its storage pod. A second, larger blast knocked the mother ship, and the Sulaco kept going while molten hull dropped into empty space.

The occupied EEV had not been hulled, but the concussion wrecked sensitive instruments. Its smaller computers tried to isolate the damage, then asked the Sulaco for a status check and got nothing. A scan of nearby space failed halfway through, then a backup brought the instruments back.

The Sulaco had been on the edge of mapped space and had not been long on the homeward run when the fire started. The EEV computer found one active beacon in the Neroid Sector, not a first choice, and the only one it could reach while systems were failing. It set a course and lit the drive while it tried to repair itself.

The readout named the rock Fiorina "Fury" 361, an Outer Veil mineral ore refinery and maximum-security work-correctional facility. The file was thin and old. Twice the damaged navigation lost the beam and flew the stored course anyway. Twice it found the signal again.

Days later the EEV dropped toward a grey atmosphere, systems failing and one backup after another cutting in. The landing gear did not answer the drop command, and there was no time or power for a second approach. The ground around the beacon was a jumble of steep rock, so the computer aimed for a sand beach. When it asked for more power, none was left. The craft fell short and hit the sea at too sharp an angle. The computer put everything it had into keeping the four cylinders whole.

The Crash

Medical officer Clemens found Ripley in the surf and carried her inside past a bug wash, then sent three prisoners back out and told them to notify Superintendent Harry Andrews. He later judged that the same disaster that ejected her had wrecked the landing controls, and that she was lucky to have come out of the bay in one piece.

Mutated oxen hauled the wreck into reach of the mine's last working external crane. The men found Hicks, Newt, and the broken android with her. Andrews used the expensive communicator and logged a time-delay transmission tagged 1844-Fiorina. A Company reply later diverted a ship already bound for Motinea.

Hicks And Newt

Twenty-five prisoners assembled in a four-storey hall with Andrews and his assistant Aaron. Dillon led a short prayer, then the men raised their right fists and sat. Morse objected to a woman on the rock. Andrews promised a rescue inside a week and told them to keep Ripley in the infirmary.

Clemens walked her to the EEV once she could stand. Hicks had been run through the chest by a support beam and never woke. Newt drowned in her cracked tube. What was left of Bishop had been thrown in the trash. Acid stain on Newt's cylinder sent Ripley to the morgue, and Clemens opened the child's chest and found nothing growing.

Babe And The Infant

Frank and Murphy hung an eleven-year-old ox named Babe in an abattoir built for hundreds of miners. Under the carcass Murphy found a crushed disc with a tail and spidery arms, took it for a beach jellyfish, and tossed it aside. Dillon later shut the leadworks so the men could attend a cremation in the old smelter, a chamber cut from rock above the ore body. While the funeral ran, Babe's dead hide swelled and burst, and a compact infant scanned the empty room.

Murphy In The Duct

Murphy later crawled a duct, found a shed metallic skin, and leaned into a recess. The grown Alien spat acid into his face. Andrews told the hall the official story: at 0400 hours, in Vent Shaft Seventeen, a downdraught put Murphy into a fan. Prisoner Jude mopped the floor while Aaron blamed himself for sending a man he already thought unstable.

Foragers In The Shafts

Dillon sent Golic, Boggs, and Rains into the old shafts as foragers. Gregor packed extra-dense wax candles cut with impurities so they would hold shape and burn a long time. The three men hunted forgotten miner stashes, kicked open a dead cigarette machine for narcosticks, and tried to map dated printouts against tunnels that no longer matched the paper. Something doused their line of candles. Rains went ahead with a torch and screamed once. The Alien took Boggs's head off the ceiling, and Golic ran.

He walked back into the mess still covered in blood and ate cereal until cook Eric dropped a stack of plates. Andrews, Aaron, Dillon, Morse, and prisoner Arthur stared. They tied Golic to an infirmary cot. Andrews treated him as a convicted multiple murderer who had likely killed his workmates, and Dillon would not accept that Golic had lied.

Bishop's Recorder

Ripley pulled a black box from the wreck, a McNary flight recorder, model OV-122, serial FR-3664874. She wired what was left of Bishop on a worktable and asked about fire in the cryogenic compartment.

The android confirmed the evacuation log and then failed as she pressed him on whether anything else had been aboard the Sulaco. She promised to store his programme if she ever got off the rock.

Clemens In The Infirmary

Andrews confined Ripley to the infirmary after she told him the Acheron story and asked for weapons. Fiorina ran on an honour system with no firearms, only kitchen knives, abattoir blades, and fire axes. Supply ships came once every six months. Clemens then told her how he had reached the post. He had finished near the top of his class while addicted to Midaphine, a drug he thought left his judgment intact. After a thirty-six-hour emergency shift he was called back for a fuel-station blast, wrote the wrong painkiller dose, and eleven patients died. He served seven years, kept a restricted 3-C license, and stayed when the other staff left because no one else would hire him.

The Alien dropped from the infirmary ceiling while he leaned in with an injector and tore his head off. It looked at Ripley, ignored Golic's offer to help it kill the others, and left through the same duct. Ripley later treated that pause as proof the thing would not risk the embryo she was carrying.

Andrews Taken

Ripley broke into the mess and told them Clemens was dead. The lights flickered, and the Alien reached down from the ceiling and lifted Andrews into an air shaft. Only Ripley and Morse saw the grab. Dillon prayed, prisoner David called the beast big and fast, and William asked who was in charge. Aaron stepped up as acting superintendent. The men called him Eighty-five from an old personnel chart, and he hated the number.

The Quinitricetyline Trap

Ripley, Aaron, and Dillon planned to burn the Alien out of the pipes with leftover quinitricetyline and drive it into a ceramocarbide toxic-waste vault. David had seen a drum of the same stuff put a tug in dry dock for seventeen weeks. Troy and Arthur hunted working light beads among discarded electronics. Kevin slathered the inside of a duct and complained about the fumes. A dropped flare lit the paint early. Fire ran the corridors, Eric squeezed into an uncoated service pipe, and men burned on the railings.

Junior baited the Alien into the vault and went in with it. Dillon got the sprinklers on, Ripley hit the red button, and the door shut on Junior's last cry. The Alien dented the barrier three times and then went quiet. Aaron told Ripley a rescue ship had acknowledged, marked her as top priority, and should arrive in four to six days.

Golic Opens The Vault

Aaron sent Morse to watch the infirmary drugs and the tied prisoner. Golic talked Morse into taking the jacket off, then hit him with a fire extinguisher and walked to the waste door. He clubbed the men on watch, forced the vault open a crack, and asked the Beast what it wanted. The Alien killed him beside the bloody club. Morse lived, and Aaron blamed him for letting the thing back into the halls.

The Queen Scan

Ripley went back to the EEV and had Aaron run the cryotube neuroscanner. Her chest came back clean, then the display showed a small embryo kin to the adult Alien already loose in the halls, and also different from it. She read an upsweeping frill on the skull and treated the long gestation in the uterine cavity as proof it was a Queen, not a worker that would have torn out through the breastbone in a day.

The Foundry Run

The survivors ran the Alien through mapped channels toward a mould and a piston that would shove it into molten metal. Vincent was torn apart in a side corridor, and David found what was left of him while he was alone on his route. Kevin was snatched from a vent. Dillon dragged him into the main corridor, and Ripley used the wounded man as bait when the piston fired, but the Alien slipped behind the machinery instead of going into the furnace. Jude died at a slamming door. Ripley later found Eric and William mixed together, and Troy died in the maze after he lost Channel F on the map.

Dillon and Ripley backed into the mould. Morse climbed the crane cab and tipped white-hot alloy onto the Alien. Ripley asked Dillon to break her neck before the Company arrived. He could not do it. The burning Alien pulled him under the metal. Ripley yanked the quench chain, cold water hit the coated body, and the head burst.

The Company Arrives

A heavy landing craft set down on gravel outside the mine. Armed Company men blew the lock. Aaron saluted as Warder Aaron, number 137512, and told their captain that Ripley was in the mould with the beast and had one inside her. The captain had Bishop's face. Ripley called him a droid. He had designed the android and copied his own features. He claimed he was human, and that the Patna carried a surgical theatre that could take the larva out and destroy it.

Ripley's Sacrifice

Ripley looked from Aaron to Morse, then shut the crane gate. Morse hit the controls, and the crane rolled away from the stairs, out over the furnace. The captain lunged for her and she broke free. Company troops opened fire. Morse took a bullet in the shoulder and dropped behind the panel.

Aaron swung a length of broken pipe into the captain's skull. The impact drew real blood, and the wounded man insisted he was not a droid. The troops shot Aaron down. Over the cauldron the heat blistered Ripley's skin as the embryo moved in her chest. She stepped off the platform and went into the molten metal. Morse was on his feet in time to see her fall.

Fury 161 Closed

Morse recited Dillon's line that the dead had moved higher, and Company biotechs bandaged the bullet wound in his shoulder. He was the last living prisoner. Other Company men worked without talk as they shut the furnace, the refinery, and the rest of Weyland-Yutani Work Correctional Facility Fury 161. A drifting radio transmission carried Ripley's old Nostromo sign-off.

Fiorina Prison

Clemens told Ripley the site had been a mine-cum-refinery for platinum-group ore, not a prison. A spike in platinum prices made a plant this far from any market worth building, and Weyland-Yutani refined the concentrated lode on the rock rather than ship raw ore. When the last worthwhile metal was gone and the price fell, the works were too expensive to move and not worth enough as salvage, so they were mothballed with ore still in the ground. The Company then leased the remaining halls as a maximum-security work prison. Society got its worst offenders off the map, and the Company got free caretakers in case prices rose again.

The big miners' hospital was stripped for parts. A smaller surgery, leftover stores, and basic computers stayed because they cost more to ship than they were worth. Andrews counted twenty-five double-Y caretaker prisoners plus two jailers. Clemens stood apart as medical officer and was still serving sentence. There was nowhere to run. A revolt would only hold an installation the men already ran, and the next supply ship would withhold drops and send troops.

The leadworks gave them a job simpler than platinum wire or heavy-machine repair. Automatic extruders drew molten lead from a glowing cauldron into thin tubes used to replace worn plant piping. The men liked the heat. Dillon could shut the cauldron with one order when he wanted them at a funeral. Foragers also hunted old miner cubbies cut into the rock, where workers had hidden Company supplies they hoped to smuggle out and sell. Those leftover stores, plus a caretaker wage better than Earthside prison pay and a supply drop every six months, were the whole economy.

Fiorina's bugs drove everyone to shave. Company poison strong enough to dent the parasites blistered skin, so an electric razor was cheaper. Some men kept eyebrows out of spite. Dillon kept one dreadlock and a pair of antique wire glasses the Company would never replace with transplants. About five years before Ripley arrived, Dillon and the others took up a private millenarian Christian mix. Andrews tolerated the prayers because they kept the men quieter, not because he thought the faith made thieves, rapists, murderers, arsonists, child molesters, or dealers any less dangerous.

Fresh food was scarce. Elongated fish with bulging eyes and small teeth came out of the dark bay, and the men argued over whether they were true fish and then ate them anyway. A few oxen remained after the miners left. Frank and Murphy had three still alive after they hung Babe. Abandoned excavators sat on the wind like dead worms, too heavy to lift offworld, with smaller rusted machines clustered around them. Prisoner Martin swept the assembly hall. View-and-read chips and the religion filled the rest of the day.

The Alien

The book uses Alien, dragon, and beast, not Xenomorph. The adult Alien that hunted Fiorina is a Runner in role, the same ox-born caste later called the Dragon. Foster has it come from Babe, not from a dog. Ripley thought the grown body looked slightly different from every type she had seen, with a fuller head and a more massive frame, and with visual receptors instead of eyes.

The first form on the Sulaco was a horseshoe-crab crawler with a ventral tube. A second crushed husk rode in under Babe. The infant that tore out of the ox scanned the abattoir alone, then shed in the ducts and spat acid into Murphy's face. It used ceilings, vents, and shafts, took heads off, and dented a ceramocarbide door from inside. It would not touch Ripley once the Queen was in her. Lead, a piston, and a quench of cold water on a metal-coated body finished it, not a rifle.

Key Characters

Andrews told the men there were twenty-five prisoners on the caretaker crew. The book names eighteen of them. The rest stay unnamed in the fire and the foundry run.

• Ellen Ripley was the Sulaco survivor who held the airlock story from Acheron, scanned the Queen in the EEV, and stepped into the lead furnace rather than give the embryo to the Company.
• Dwayne Hicks left Acheron with acid burns that still needed a hospital two years away. A support beam went through his chest in the crash, and he never woke.
• Newt drowned in her cracked cryotube after the Facehugger split the dome. Clemens's autopsy found no embryo in her.
• Bishop slept as wreckage, was dumped in the trash, and later read the McNary recorder from a worktable before his power failed.
• Jonathan Clemens was the chief medical officer and a prisoner with a restricted 3-C license after the Midaphine deaths. The Alien took his head in the infirmary.
• Harry Andrews was the superintendent who hated surprise, billed Fiorina as twenty-five double-Y caretakers, and was lifted into an air shaft during a mess-hall speech.
• Aaron was Andrews's assistant, later acting superintendent. Prisoners called him Eighty-five from a stolen IQ chart. He ran the neuroscanner, hit Bishop II with a pipe, and was shot by the Company troops. His warder number was 137512.
• Bishop II arrived with the Patna, wore Bishop's face, and claimed he had designed the android from his own features. Aaron's pipe drew real blood. Later stories name the same Company man Michael Bishop.
• Dillon was the inmate leader who wore heirloom glasses and one dreadlock, preached the millenarian mix, broke up the assault on Ripley, and went under the molten metal with the Alien.
• Morse was in his late twenties, jumpy, with gold-anodized teeth. He saw Andrews taken, freed Golic, flew the crane, took a bullet in the shoulder, and left as the last living prisoner.
• Golic was a convicted multiple murderer, a nonverbal eater Dillon forced onto the forage team. He opened the waste vault to talk to the Beast and died beside the club he had used on the door guards.
• Boggs foraged the shafts with Rains and Golic and was decapitated from the ceiling.
• Rains went ahead to relight the candles and was taken first in the tunnel.
• Murphy had been a thief most of his life. He hung Babe, tossed the crushed Facehugger, and died in a duct after the Alien spat acid into his face.
• Frank was the older abattoir partner who chained Babe up and treated any dead ox as extra meat.
• Junior joined the attack on Ripley after she brought Bishop's remains in, then baited the Alien into the waste vault and died when the door shut.
• Jude mopped after Murphy, ran the foundry corridors, and died when the Alien punched through a door window and caught him.
• Gregor packed the forage candles and later ran the foundry channels with William.
• Troy sat the leadworks controls, hunted working light beads with Arthur, and died in the foundry maze after he lost the map.
• Arthur helped Troy sort electronics and was in the mess when Golic walked in bloody.
• David saw Andrews taken, moved the quinitricetyline drums, and had watched a drum of that stuff wreck a tug for seventeen weeks.
• Eric was the day cook who dropped the plates at Golic's return, hid in a service pipe during the fire, and later died in the foundry with William.
• Kevin painted ducts with quinitricetyline, had been an athlete, and was snatched from a vent and used as piston bait.
• William asked who was in charge after Andrews died, then died in the foundry with Eric.
• Vincent was dismembered in a side corridor during the foundry run. David found what was left of him.
• Martin swept the assembly hall while Clemens showed Ripley the room.

Place In The Books

The novel is the third Alien book, published with the film in 1992, six years after Foster's Aliens book and thirteen years after the first novelization. The EEV readout uses Fiorina Fury 361. The shutdown line at the end uses Fury 161, the number later stories keep. Hicks and Newt die in the crash, the same close as the film and the opposite of William Gibson's unused first-draft Alien 3.

T. R. Napper's later Aliens: Bishop can be read as a sequel. It continues Bishop after the trash heap, Michael Bishop after the Patna landing, and Morse as the last prisoner taken off the rock.

Warner Books released the first edition as a mass-market paperback in June 1992 at $4.99. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists 218 pages. The printed credit is a novel by Alan Dean Foster based on the screenplay by David Giler, Walter Hill, and Larry Ferguson, from a story by Vincent Ward, from characters created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Warner Books UK and Little, Brown UK issued 218-page paperbacks the same year. Titan Books later kept the text in print as Alien 3: The Official Movie Novelization, a 256-page paperback from May 2014. In October 1993, Warner UK and Sphere published The Complete Alien Omnibus, about 650 pages, binding this novel with Foster's Alien and Aliens books.

Behind The Scenes

Alan Dean Foster wrote from the Giler, Hill, and Ferguson prison-foundry script after the 1979 and 1986 books. Warner timed the paperback for June, weeks after the film. Foster tried to keep two characters alive against the screenplay and was overruled. He turned down Alien: Resurrection after those fights, then came back for Alien: Covenant. The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers named him a Grand Master in 2008.

Foster's text keeps the ox Babe, the waste-vault capture, and Golic opening that door, the same order as the later Assembly Cut rather than the 1992 theatrical dog-host print. It also keeps twenty-five caretakers, platinum-group mine history, lead tube work, mutated oxen on the wreck, ten EEVs, the Motinea diversion, Clemens's Midaphine case, Aaron's stolen IQ chart, Morse's gold teeth, the McNary serial, a uterine Queen scan after a clean chest, and Bishop II bleeding after the pipe. The film never numbers the rock 361, never names Babe in the theatrical cut, and never gives Aaron a warder number on screen. A hidden egg on the Sulaco is the implied source of the Facehugger, as in the film opening.

Conclusion

Alien 3 is Alan Dean Foster's 1992 novel of the film, published by Warner Books. It covers Ellen Ripley from the Sulaco fire to the Fiorina furnace, with an ox-born Alien and a Queen embryo the Company wanted alive. The book ends with the leadworks shut, the prison closed, Aaron and Dillon dead, Morse the last wounded prisoner, and Ripley gone into the metal.

External Sources

• Alien 3 at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Alien 3: The Official Movie Novelization at Titan Books
• Alan Dean Foster at Wikipedia

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