Alien Resurrection Novel: Plot, Lore & Movie Differences

Alien: Resurrection is a 1997 novel by A. C. Crispin, published by Warner Aspect on 27 November 1997, the day after the 1997 film opened. It followed the clone Ripley 8 on the military lab ship USM Auriga, parked at the gravitational center of Pluto and Charon, after scientists cut a Queen from her chest. It was the fourth Alien book after Alan Dean Foster's three film novels, the one Foster turned down.

Plot Summary

Blood and tissue from Fiorina 161 sat unused for twenty-five years, then nearly went into the incinerator twice. Dr. Mason Wren took the project ten years before the outbreak, and the cells only held after the team moved onto the Auriga in the last two years. Earlier incubators had failed before this host held. Soldier Vincent Distephano stood a dead shift in the aft command capsule while Wren walked the morning stations, then the incubator that finally held a usable host.

Bugs On The Auriga

Distephano crushed a small insect on the console in the aft command capsule and hid the mess from General Martin Allahandro Carlos Perez. Perez wanted every uninvited bug caught alive for classification, so the staff could trace which unofficial cargo drop had brought it in. A dead shift left Distephano with little else to watch besides the Pluto-Charon dark. He blew the remains onto the viewport rather than file that paperwork.

The Auriga collected mosquitoes that had escaped an early lab, spiders from Perez's unofficial crates, and odd frontier insects. A geyser display in the capsule had stopped erupting. Distephano was on a one-year tour with three months left and wanted a later posting with more work, such as the outpost on Rigel. Perez treated every stray bug as a cargo leak, so a smear on the command glass was enough to put Distephano on report.

Number Eight

Dr. Jonathan Gediman opened the incubator for Wren, a cold cylinder that lifted its own housing to the ceiling. The fetus floated in gel with four buds on the spine where dorsal horns would grow. A month later she nearly filled a three-metre tube, and the lab staff kept walking over just to look. Dual heart traces labeled the woman HOST and the faster symbiont SUBJECT.

Gediman cut the Queen out with a robot arm, six umbilical lines, and sent the tiny Alien to a growing tank with Dr. Matt Kinloch and graduate student Trish Fontaine. Wren ordered the host sewn back up. Dr. Dan Sprague closed the wound, then the clone woke, grabbed his arm through the chamber, and broke it so bone showed. Distephano stunned her at point-blank charge.

They tattooed 8 on her inner arm and logged her as Lieutenant First Class, number 51556170. A mosquito bit her and died in her blood. Wren later cut away four vestigial dorsal horn buds and left eight diagonal scars on her spine. She throttled him once she could stand, and he stunned her again. Perez kept her under two-guard watch after that, and let Wren study the host instead of killing her.

The Betty Docks

The unregistered smuggler Betty came in on an approach vector Distephano was watching from the capsule. Private hulls almost never delivered to a hush-hush post, and he had enough firepower under his thumb to scatter the ship. Perez's own voice cleared them on code 6993. Captain Frank Elgyn brought twenty cryo boxes of kidnapped hosts.

In the mess, Ripley 8 beat Johner, pilot Sabra Hillard, and Christie after they tested her. She kept a basketball in one hand through that fight and put it into Hillard's gut after she threw the pilot off. Weyland-Yutani had gone under decades earlier and been bought by Wal-Mart, with a few old defense contracts left under the military. Perez kept the docking off the regular supply list.

Twenty Hosts

The team put Facehuggers on the twenty sleepers as the eggs opened one after another. Larry Purvis, identity 12-7-49, came out of the cryodrugs while the thing on the next stand was still closed, then woke all the way as it opened in front of him. He slapped the tube controls and could not get out. The crawler filled his mouth and throat and put him back under.

Wren treated the rest as cargo that would only dream the attack. Purvis had come off the Moon after two years trying to fix a marriage, then signed a two-year nickel contract for a rock called Xarem. Gediman later saw that same face in replay and knew Purvis still carried the embryo. Borderline low thyroid function slowed the growth, not enough for Wren to treat it.

Call In The Cell

New Betty hire Annalee Call faked a drunk walk out of the crew suite, then used lock sprays of her own making to reach Ripley 8's cell. She had taken the Betty job as cover so she could put a sleeve stiletto through the clone's heart and stop the project. The cell had no furniture and a ceiling viewport the watch used when they bothered to look. The chest scar told her the Queen was already out. Ripley 8 pushed her own palm onto the blade until acid blood melted the steel, then threw Call out of the cell. Two steps past the door a guard stunned her at the neck, and Wren ordered the Betty crew rounded up.

Ripley 8 held pieces of Ellen Ripley's memory, including a daughter named Amy whose sleeper pod was found fifty-seven years late. With Kinloch and guard Vehrenberg she named child's flashcards in more than one language, including Arabic and Japanese printed on the door sign. Ripley 8 treated those languages the same way she treated walking, and she never asked where they came from. Call had read Morse and the banned histories, and she treated the clone as a lab construct, not Ellen Ripley.

The Mess Hall Fight

The smugglers broke Ripley 8 out when the ship went to emergency, after Wren ordered the Betty crew rounded up and soldiers came into the mess to take them. Christie killed four of those soldiers and a fifth with a ceiling ricochet from a sleeve gun. Johner killed one more, speech slurred from drink, and still took Distephano's gun once Christie had the soldier's hands behind his back.

Father, the ship's computer, warned of an armed attack in the mess while Gediman and Williamson watched the screens from the observation room. Christie pinned Wren with a gun to his head, and Elgyn held Call back when she tried to leave on her own. The Betty crew kept Wren and Distephano as hostages and started for the dock. They left without stripping more rifles off the dead soldiers, a gap Elgyn felt as soon as they were back in the corridors.

Acid Through The Floor

In the holding cages two larger adult Aliens tore the smallest of the three apart so acid blood ate through two decks. Gediman hit the nitrogen fail-safe and got steam, not screams. Williamson shouted from the observation port as the cage glass started to melt. When the fog lifted, a warrior dragged him under the floor.

Father repeated structural damage to holding facility 001 until the mess-hall screens no longer mattered. Facilities 001 through 010 went down after that. Dr. Brian Clauss later found smashed cages and five soldiers still breathing but unable to move. Williamson ran after Gediman when he was taken and did not come back with him.

Perez And The Lifeboats

Perez tried to empty lifeboat 1 after a warrior boarded it, then dropped a grenade through the closing hatch and launched the boat himself. Soldier Olsen was halfway in and went with the boat. Perez sent the next man toward lifeboat 2, then a warrior tongue went through his skull on the deck. Lifeboat 2 was already disabled.

Perez had planned to run the Auriga from the boats and park the station somewhere the Aliens could not hunt. Father locked an emergency return for Earth in its male voice instead. On hard damage the hull autopiloted home, about ninety-six minutes from dock when that order first engaged. Perez had dressed down Wren and Gediman earlier for keeping the host alive after the Queen came out.

Elgyn And The Lab

A warrior pulled Elgyn through a melted hole in the deck after he left the line to pick up abandoned rifles. The tail came through his chest from below. Ripley 8 shot the Alien from inside the corpse. Hillard ran back for him, covered his face, and Vriess hauled himself along on the chair.

In the experimental lab the team found Kinloch, Carlyn Williamson, Sprague, and Fontaine glued to the walls, already burst. The hive had turned the room into Alien architecture, resin over the benches and walls. Wren had used those same benches that morning to check overnight tests. The empty corridors on the way there had cost Elgyn, and no soldiers came to stop them.

The Failed Clones

Ripley 8 walked the numbered tanks of the failed clones while the Auriga was past Jupiter's moons on the home run. Number 1 was a deformed fetus in a jar. Number 2 was child-sized, with Ripley's face and dorsal horns. Numbers 3 through 6 ran from a tailed body with no face to a near-adult with a Queen head.

Number 7 was alive in an intensive-care frame, used Ripley 8's face, and asked to die. Call handed Ripley 8 a flamethrower Distephano had pulled from a weapons cache. Ripley 8 burned that sister and the rest of the room, then shut the door on the fire. Wren had wanted ice samples from the tanks and never reached them.

The Flooded Galley

Wren sent them down a sealed stair and through a flooded galley, about twenty-five metres under the cooling tower. Christie carried Vriess tied to his back. Hillard saw that Ripley 8 was not fighting for air the way the rest of them were. An underwater Alien took Hillard from behind while Purvis and Distephano took on water.

Call cut at a hive web with the stub of her melted stiletto, then Ripley 8 tore the rest of it off the surface. Ripley 8 bit the tail off a Facehugger in the water and ripped the rest of it apart. In the elevator shaft a warrior spat into Christie's face. He cut himself loose and fell with it rather than pull Vriess and the others down.

Call The Auton

Wren shot Call on the run, and white blood showed she was a Second Generation Auton, built after androids had been outlawed. She had hidden that from the Betty crew from the day Elgyn hired her. The government had recalled and wrecked most of that line for being too ethical, though a few escaped the massacre. Johner and the others only saw the white blood after the shot.

Call plugged into Father, raised oxygen to forty-three percent, and later spoke over the ship in her own voice. She could not force the reactor to a full blow from that port. The Auton code let her open path doors and drop the Betty's docking magnets once they reached the bay. The higher mix kept the remaining crew moving on the home run.

Purvis And Wren

Wren broke for the Betty on his own after he shot Call. Purvis caught him in the dock corridor, beat him down, and pinned him. Purvis treated Wren as the man who had put the embryo in him, even though the Betty had kidnapped the hosts. The Chestburster came out through Wren's forehead while Purvis still held him.

The crew shot Wren, Purvis, and the infant. That gunfight nicked the Betty's cargo-door hydraulics and left the doors half open later. Ripley 8 had smelled the embryo in Purvis earlier and had not cut it out. The leak was the gap the Newborn used once it reached the bay.

The Newborn

A warrior dragged Ripley 8 into the waste-tank nest. The cloned Queen had shed her egg sack and carried a swollen mammalian belly, the extra cycle Wren's work had added from host DNA. She gave live birth to the Newborn. The hybrid killed her, ate Gediman's brain through an opened skull, and ignored a small chestburster that left Gediman's ribs.

The Newborn reached for Ripley 8 as its mother and used hive speech she could hear. It used Newt's words about Ripley coming back. Ripley 8 refused it and climbed out a ceiling trap. Call could not force the reactor to a full blow, so Ripley 8 ordered a crash instead.

Vacuum On The Betty

Call started the Betty, opened the path doors, and dropped the docking magnets. Ripley 8 jumped the cargo bay as the lock closed. The cargo doors were half open from the hydraulic leak in the dock fight. The Newborn forced those jammed doors shut, then hunted Call through the cabin.

Johner and Vriess fired and hit Call instead of the hybrid. It ate Distephano's brain and used Call as a shield when the others fired. Ripley 8 melted a porthole with her own acid blood. Vacuum pulled the hybrid apart against the Australian dawn outside as the Betty pulled away from the Auriga.

Landing On Earth

Call had set the Auriga to miss Earth's orbital metal grid and hit coordinates 760, 403 in the empty central Australian outback, with braking off. The clock ran forty-three minutes eight seconds to impact. The Betty was clear of the hull before the strike. The ship struck like a meteorite, seismographs recorded it worldwide, and a warrior in the nest heard the last six-second warning.

Johner and engineer John Vriess fought the Betty through a rough entry. Ripley 8 and Call watched blue sky and soil come up, the first Earth of this life for the clone and the first landing for the Auton. Ripley 8 was a stranger there herself, and she made that plain to Call. Memories of Newt, Amy, Hicks, and Bishop no longer tore at her the same way.

The Auriga

The Auriga was a United Systems Military stealth lab at the Pluto-Charon barycenter, far past any regular post. Perez kept it spit-clean and off the books. Congress had not approved the clone work. On serious damage, Father sent the hull home to Earth on autopilot.

Named lab staff under Wren were Gediman, Williamson, Kinloch, Yoshi Watanabe, Clauss, Sprague, and Fontaine. Watanabe set Sprague's broken arm. A chapel carried interchangeable religious symbols and a Bible with a data port. Earth itself was mostly slum, with about two thirds of the globe hidden under a giant orbital lattice, and the real work sitting in the colonies.

The Betty was an old unregistered hull with camouflage paint, wartime pin-up nose art, atmospheric wings, and a feminine computer voice. Christie hid sleeve guns in his forearms. Vriess, paralyzed from the waist down after a fight on Kawlang, hid weapons in his chair. Johner took a facial scar in that same action.

The Aliens

The book uses Alien more than Xenomorph. Crispin writes stretches from inside Ripley 8, the cloned Queen, a lead Warrior, and the Newborn, all carrying pieces of Ellen Ripley's memory. The Queen embryo in the Fiorina sample acted like a virus that had rewritten every cell, which is why one tissue lot could grow both a woman and a Queen.

The cloned Warriors had six fingers, dorsal horns, and no eyes. The tubular head read heat, vibration, scent, and movement in a full sphere, including name tags and emotion as color. They learned from the nitrogen fail-safe, swam the flooded decks, and spat venom. Wren estimated about twenty mature specimens after the first breeding, with the count doubling in hours.

The Newborn came out pale, about two metres, with five fingers and brown eyes like Ripley's. It had no inner jaw at first, then grew an extendable toothed tongue. It laughed in short breaths, sealed the Betty's cargo doors before it turned on the crew, and treated Call as a shield. Lead, quench, and rifle fire never entered this book. Acid on a porthole and vacuum finished it.

Key Characters

The book names the Betty six, the Auriga command and science staff, the twenty hosts as a group, and Purvis by name. Clauss and Watanabe have no confirmed death on the page. Soldiers Vehrenberg and Calabrese appear once and drop out of the text.

• Ripley 8 was the successful clone, tattoo 8, Lieutenant First Class 51556170. Wren cut her dorsal buds. She burned the failed tanks, refused the Newborn, and left Earthfall with Call, Johner, and Vriess.
• Annalee Call joined the Betty to stop the project, revealed as a Second Generation Auton after Wren shot her, hacked Father, and set the Australian crash.
• Johner was the scarred Betty hand who lost the mess fight to Ripley 8, then helped fly the ship down. The book never gives him a first name.
• John Vriess was the Betty engineer, paralyzed from Kawlang, who hid guns in his chair and survived the entry.
• Frank Elgyn captained the Betty, mid-forties and reedy, and died with a warrior through the chest.
• Sabra Hillard flew the Betty and drowned in the flooded galley.
• Christie was the arms man with dreadlocks and sleeve guns. He cut himself free in the shaft and fell with a warrior.
• Vincent Distephano stood the command capsule, stunned Ripley 8 after Sprague's arm, and died on the Betty when the Newborn ate his brain.
• General Martin Allahandro Carlos Perez ran the Auriga, dropped the grenade into lifeboat 1, and died to a warrior tongue.
• Dr. Mason Wren led the clone project, cut the dorsal buds, shot Call, and died when Purvis's Chestburster came through his skull.
• Dr. Jonathan Gediman treated the specimen as his own work, cut the Queen free, and died in the nest after the Newborn opened his skull.
• Dr. Dan Sprague closed Ripley 8, lost an arm in the chamber, and later burst on a lab wall.
• Dr. Matt Kinloch ran flashcard tests and died on the lab wall.
• Dr. Carlyn Williamson ran morning stations for Wren and died on the lab wall.
• Trish Fontaine was the graduate student who carried the infant Queen with Kinloch and died on the lab wall.
• Larry Purvis was host 12-7-49 from the Moon-to-Xarem run. He killed Wren as the infant tore out, then the crew shot him.
• Olsen was the late soldier caught in lifeboat 1 when Perez grenaded it.
• Father was the Auriga's male-voiced computer. Call later used that system in her own voice.
• Clone 7 was the only failed tank still alive. She asked Ripley 8 to kill her, and the flamethrower did.

Place In The Books

The novel is the fourth Alien film book, published with the movie in 1997, after Foster's 1979 Alien and 1986 Aliens books and five years after his Alien 3 novelization. It is the only main-series film novel Foster refused. The title page of the first edition also credits Kathleen O'Malley. Later Titan printings drop that name and keep Crispin alone.

Warner Aspect released the first edition as a mass-market paperback in November 1997. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists a December first printing and 276 pages. The printed credit is a novelization by A. C. Crispin based on the screenplay by Joss Whedon, from characters created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Warner Books UK issued a 276-page paperback the same year. Titan Books later kept the text in print as Alien Resurrection: The Official Movie Novelization, a 320-page paperback from 31 March 2015. This book never sat in The Complete Alien Omnibus with Foster's first three novels.

Behind The Scenes

A. C. Crispin wrote from Whedon's script after Foster left the line. Warner timed the Aspect paperback for the film week. Crispin had novelized other studio properties, including the V miniseries and Star Wars Han Solo books. She died in 2013, two years before Titan's reprint.

The text keeps Special Edition beats the 1997 theatrical cut trimmed, including Ripley 8 breaking Sprague's arm. It also keeps twenty hosts, Perez's full name, Pluto-Charon station, the Wal-Mart line, vestigial dorsal buds, numbered tanks 1 through 7, Call's Auton recall, and a Newborn that seals the Betty doors before it hunts. The film crash puts the Auriga into a remote part of Africa. Crispin put the impact in the central Australian outback at 760, 403 instead. The Betty stays in the air over Earth in the last pages and does not set down outside ruined Paris.

Conclusion

Alien: Resurrection is A. C. Crispin's 1997 novel of the film, published by Warner Aspect. It covers Ripley 8 from the Auriga incubator to the Betty, with a cloned Queen, twenty hosts, and a Newborn the military never controlled. The book ends with the Auriga wrecked in Australia and Ripley 8, Call, Johner, and Vriess still in the air over Earth.

External Sources

• Alien: Resurrection at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Alien Resurrection: The Official Movie Novelization at Titan Books
• A. C. Crispin at Wikipedia

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