Aliens Novelization: Plot, Lore & Movie Differences

Published: June 1986
Author: Alan Dean Foster
Publisher: Warner Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 247
ISBN: 978-0-446-30139-8
Series: Film novelization
Setting: Acheron / USS Sulaco

Aliens is a 1986 novel by Alan Dean Foster, published by Warner Books in June 1986, before the 1986 film opened on 18 July. It followed Ellen Ripley onto the troop transport Sulaco with a squad of Colonial Marines after contact was lost with the colony Hadley's Hope on Acheron. It was the second Alien book after Foster's 1979 Alien novelization.

Plot Summary

A ranging vessel found the lifeboat Narcissus drifting near a familiar star with no beacon and no running lights. Ripley and Jones were asleep in one capsule. Three boarders cut a door that had been jammed from inside and found a torn grappling cable on the floor, which ended any salvage payout.

Two Dreamers

A deep-salvage crew argued over the blip that turned out to be the Narcissus. The contact was too small, sat in the wrong place, and sent no emergency call. The captain ordered a short course change and planned to hide the extra fuel cost in the books. Once they locked on, they waited out the air in their lock, then burned the jammed hatch.

Ripley woke on Gateway Station after a couple of days. No one in the records had lived more than 65 years in a freezer. She had pushed that limit, and the first hours back were a medical hallucination of a Chestburster tearing out of her. Jones had pet privilege on the station. He did not go to Acheron.

Gateway

An eight-member board sat under Van Leuwen, with an ECA man and an insurance investigator among them. Burke was in the room and not on the board. The flight recorder backed the landing on LV-426, the repairs, and the self-destruct. It did not back the creature on the shuttle. Ripley lost her ICC commercial licence for good, took no criminal charge, and drew six months of psychometric probation.

She had been gone 57 years. Amanda Ripley-McClaren had died two years earlier at 66, of cancer, cremated at Westlake Repository in Little Chute, Wisconsin, with no children. Ripley had missed her eleventh birthday. Van Leuwen later used the name Acheron for a shake-and-bake colony of sixty or seventy families with more than twenty years on the rock, and no indigenous life past a virus or a flatworm.

The Jordens

Operations manager Simpson, a burly man who chewed an illegal stimulant and almost never left the control block, sent wildcatters past the Ilium Range on a Company grid search for radioactives. His assistant Lydecker logged the claim. Russ and Anne Jorden took their children Rebecca, called Newt, and Tim out in tractor Alpha Kilo Two Four Niner.

They found a derelict hull with no beacon and no marker, hidden from colony detectors by the mountains and by processor heat. The kids stayed in the tractor. Anne dragged Russ back with a Facehugger on his face, a flat, ribbed, horseshoe-crab shape with a pulsing body and a tail around the suit neck. She sent a Mayday to Hadley Control. Newt saw her father on the ground. The book never names Weyland-Yutani. The Company wrote the grid order.

Burke and Lieutenant Scott Gorman came to Ripley's apartment after contact with Acheron was lost. She was working the Portside cargo docks on a class-two loader rating. Burke offered the licence back and a cleared record if she went as a consultant. She shut them out, then called Burke back after another Chestburster nightmare and took the job on the condition that the colony be burned out, not studied.

The Sulaco

The Sulaco was an ugly, patched warship of metal, composites, and ceramic, kept in service by upgrades instead of replacement. Fourteen people slept the freezers: eleven Marines, Ripley, Burke, and a sedated passenger. Bishop stayed awake and did the valet work after the tubes opened. The troopers had about three weeks in the freezers before the job.

Master Sergeant Apone ran the squad. Corporal Dwayne Hicks was next in line and carried a sawed-off pump twelve-gauge in a harness, a family gun. Hudson was a Comtech Corporal and a close-combat specialist who ran the motion trackers. Gorman had thirty-eight simulated drops and two or three real ones, counting this trip.

Private Jenette Vasquez and Private Mark Drake took the smartguns, and they hid spare power cells when Gorman later ordered the rifles pulled. Drake kept a scar that curled one side of his mouth into a sneer. Surgeons could have fixed it. He treated it as a medal. Corporal Cynthia Dietrich was the medtech. Privates Ricco Frost, Tim Crowe, and Trevor Wierzbowski filled the rest of the fireteam.

Pilot-Corporal Colette Ferro flew the dropship. PFC Daniel Spunkmeyer was crew chief. In the mess, Wierzbowski corrected Frost on a girl named Leina instead of Myrna, then stared at the officers' table because Gorman would not eat with the grunts. Crowe talked about a girlfriend stenciled on his armour.

The Dropship

The Sulaco sat in low geo-stationary orbit over Acheron. Ferro took the dropship and the APC down through cloud with winds over two hundred, bouncing through jet streams with no visibility until a hazy beacon showed. Burke claimed about thirty fusion atmosphere processors on the planet, each rated for twenty to thirty years. Ferro set down on the colony pad, the APC rolled out, and the dropship lifted again to wait. Ripley had used a Sulaco backup power loader to get the APC aboard before they left.

Hadley's Hope

Tractors sat nose to nose across the main lock. Hudson bypassed a sealed door. Inside they found acid holes through the floors into the maintenance level and pulse-rifle damage, then a dead and empty complex. Hudson restored the maps in Operations Central and put the Alien traffic under the atmosphere-processing station, sublevel C, south complex. Dust had got into every seal. Colonists called that particulate osmosis. Ripley later counted 157 colonists minus Newt.

Medlab

Frost found the medical wing barricaded, the fight stopped in the outer room. Stasis tubes held colonist Facehuggers, two alive and the rest dead, the dead ones a different colour. Surgeon Chester O. Ling was one of three Hadley doctors. One colonist died when a Facehugger was cut off. Another was carrying an embryo.

Newt was in the ducts, six years old, with a First-Grade Citizenship Award solido and a doll head she called Casey. Only Tim used Rebecca. She went by Newt. The Marines treated her as the last living colonist they could reach.

The Hive

The APC went to the atmosphere processor. Resin chambers held cocooned colonists, many of them dead, rib cages blown outward. A living woman asked them to kill her as a Chestburster came through, and Apone burned that wall with Frost's incinerator. Gorman ordered the rifle magazines collected and left them with flamethrowers only.

Ripley warned that a hit on the heat exchangers could drop fusion containment and wreck the plant in a thermonuclear blast. Dietrich was grabbed, and her reflex flame burned Frost alive. Wierzbowski's monitor went flat in the hive, while Crowe and Dietrich stayed low on the readouts, paralyzed rather than dead.

Apone's suit monitor went dark. Vasquez and Drake fired back to back on hidden smartgun cells while Gorman froze. Ripley drove the APC into the cocoon chamber and pulled Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, and Drake. Drake took acid in the face and chest on the way out, and his flamethrower dumped into the cabin.

An adult Xenomorph came through the roof hatch after Gorman and paralyzed him with a tail sting. Hicks shot that one at the crew door with the shotgun. Bishop treated the sting as a muscle-specific neurotoxin that would wear off. Hudson had a light acid mist on one arm.

The APC made the landing field with a blown transaxle. Newt was under the driver seat. Hudson read Dietrich, Crowe, and Gorman as low but not flat. Ripley treated the taken Marines as being cocooned and past a rescue.

Dropship Crash

After the hive, while the survivors held Operations, Spunkmeyer rolled a pallet of equipment into Bishop's lab and walked the empty corridors back to the landing pad, knowing Crowe, Dietrich, and Apone were gone. On the dropship loading ramp he slipped on a thick gel that looked like Bishop's preserving fluid, except it had no formaldehyde smell, and he could not remember breaking a bottle.

Hicks called Ferro in to lift them off the damaged APC and get off Acheron. Ferro was over the causeway and needed Spunkmeyer in the cockpit. The compartment door opened on an adult Xenomorph instead, and it slammed her into the console. The dropship veered, clipped a rock at the edge of the causeway, tumbled onto its back, and exploded across the tarmac.

Part of an engine module hit the APC and cooked the ammunition stored in the airspace between its walls, which blew the carrier apart. The burning dropship skipped into the outskirts of the atmosphere-processing station. The survivors ran for the nearest building, then came back out to a wrecked ride and no way off the planet.

Hicks sent them to the smoking APC for whatever had survived the fire. Vasquez and Hudson made a last run and hauled scorched packing cases back to Operations. The ammunition in the carrier walls was gone. The usable haul was four pulse rifles with about fifty rounds each, about fifteen M-40 grenades, two flamethrowers that were less than half full, one of them damaged, and four robot sentries sealed in foam with their scanners and display relays intact. The hard cases kept those guns from cooking off with the rest of the carrier.

Sentry Guns

Hicks put the four packed sentry guns into the Operations holdout. A and B covered the tunnels at fifty rounds each, and C and D sat on the corridors. Hudson had emplaced hundreds of the same units on other jobs, and the guns could tell dripping water from a moving body.

A and B burned their magazines and killed many Aliens. A triple-alloy fire door held, but the welds did not, because they had only a gas torch and no chromite. The Aliens cut colony power, learned the kill zones, and later came through the ceiling plenum. Hicks figured a rescue about seventeen days after they missed the mission update. Hudson did not expect them to last seventeen hours.

Bishop's Pipe

Bishop used an acid hole in the medical-lab floor, left from the colonists' last fight, and crawled the subfloor conduits about one hundred and eighty metres. The crawl was about forty minutes, the uplink patch about an hour, ship prep about thirty, and the remote flight about fifty, with the wind against him. Halfway along he found an acid-etched crack. An Alien's jaws slammed the steel when he looked through, then it left him alone in the pipe.

Hardwiring was cut colony-wide. Bishop patched a portable terminal at the uplink tower by hand. Damage from the C-level fight, the dropship hit, or the Aliens had put the processor on a fuse of about four hours. He put the blast at about ten megatons and a thirty-kilometre radius, with no fallout.

Operations

Bishop had cut open dead Facehuggers and wondered if a synthetic host would take. Burke ordered the live specimens held for a Bioweapons Division. Ripley wanted them destroyed after the study. Burke planned to walk them past Gateway customs in hidden stasis near the Sulaco engines.

Ripley put Company Directive 6129, dated 13 May 1979, on Burke for sending the Jordens to the derelict with no warning. One hundred and fifty-seven colonists were dead, plus Marines. Bishop and Ripley talked through a hive with an egg-laying Queen larger than the Warriors, and eggs that might have been carried from the derelict rather than laid on the ship. The Queen may have picked the heat-exchanger site by instinct or by choice.

Burke released live Facehuggers from stasis, killed the lights and the securcam, and locked Medical. He meant to put embryos in Ripley and Newt, slow them in hypersleep, wake early, kill the others in their tubes, and smuggle the specimens. Hicks, Hudson, and Gorman got the two out. Burke fled.

Aliens came through the ceiling of Operations and dragged Hudson through the floor into the crawlway under the deck. Ripley, Newt, Hicks, Gorman, and Vasquez went into Newt's ducts to get out of that wing.

Newt Gets Taken

They were trapped in those ducts when Aliens flattened themselves into the tunnels from both ends. Hicks cut a hole in the wall with a hand torch, and they dropped into a serviceway. An adult Xenomorph came down a vertical shaft onto Vasquez, and acid from the hits ate through her armour into her leg. Gorman went back for her. The two of them armed grenades together as more Aliens passed the hole, and the blast shook the level while Ripley, Newt, and Hicks ran.

Newt led them to a steep vent shaft she had used before. A rusted climb rib gave way under her. Hicks caught her jacket at the foot of the chute, but she slipped out of it and fell into the dark. Ripley went down after her.

Hicks followed with a locator set on a tracer bracelet. He had given the bracelet to Ripley, and she had given it to Newt. They found her under a welded floor grate in a flooded chamber, and Hicks started cutting the bars. An adult Xenomorph rose from the water behind her and took her before they could pull her out. The only sign left of her was the doll head Casey, which sank in the water.

Hicks had to drag Ripley away from the hole. On the way up, an adult Xenomorph jammed an arm through the elevator doors. Hicks shot it at close range, and acid ate through his armour into his chest. They reached Bishop at the transmitter tower as he set the second dropship down, with twenty-six minutes left on the processor. Hicks was on pain shots and could not go back into the station. Ripley would not leave Newt in the hive.

Ripley In The Hive

Ripley tape-welded Hicks's pulse rifle to a flamethrower, loaded grenades and spare magazines, and took a freight elevator to C-level at the bottom of the processor. She and Hicks used first names, Ellen and Dwayne, on the pad before she went in. Bishop stayed with Hicks and kept the dropship ready.

The station voice counted down the evacuation while she marked turns with timed flares and followed the locator through resin and cocooned colonists. The signal led her to Burke, sealed in the wall, who could feel an embryo moving inside him. She primed a grenade, put it in his hand, and kept going. The blast went off behind her as she followed the locator deeper in.

The locator reading fell to zero on Newt's shredded bracelet on the tunnel floor. A scream pulled Ripley into the egg chamber. A Facehugger was coming out of an egg beside Newt, who was cocooned in resin that had not hardened yet. Ripley shot the Facehugger before it could leap, burned a Warrior that charged her, and pulled Newt free of the soft resin.

The Queen hung above that cache, six-limbed, with a distended egg sac slung from the pipes by a web membrane. Tiny drone Aliens moved fresh eggs off an ovipositor line inside that sac. Ripley had walked under part of it on the way in without looking up. She put four grenades into the sac and burned eggs, Warriors, and drones on the way out, with Newt on her back. The Queen tore free of the ruined sac and came after them. By the freight elevators the flamethrower tank was empty, the rifle magazines were gone, and Ripley threw the dual weapon aside.

Hangar Fight

The first freight elevator had been wrecked by falling debris. Ripley called the second cage, then climbed a service ladder with Newt on her back because the cage was too slow. The Queen shoved an arm through the stairwell door behind them, talons punching the floor. They came out onto the upper landing platform and the dropship was gone. Bishop had lifted off when the pad started to fail, and he was hovering close to the ground with a monitor on the exit.

The Queen came up in that second elevator as the station counted thirty seconds to a safe distance. Ripley put a leg over the railing with Newt on her back, then the dropship rose under them with the loading boom out. She jumped onto the boom, and Bishop pulled them into the bay. An explosion slammed the hovering ship sideways, and the landing legs tore into the platform before he pulled free and opened the engines. The ten-megaton blast shook the dropship as they left the air and climbed to the Sulaco.

On the Sulaco hangar ramp a drop of acid hissed on the metal. The Queen had hidden in a landing-gear bay, with the atmospheric plates bent aside or ripped away. She drove a tail sting through Bishop's chest, tore him in two, and dropped to the deck smoking from the hive fire. Newt ran for the subfloor service channels. Ripley drew the Queen away from her and took a power loader out of storage.

The loader and the Queen wrecked crates and gear across the bay. Ripley burned her in the face with the cutting torch, and the two of them rolled into the loading dock, the machine pinning the Queen on the outer lock. Acid ate holes in those doors, and air started to leave the ship. Bishop's upper half caught Newt's belt as the suction dragged her across the deck. The Queen latched onto Ripley's ankle on the ladder. Her shoe came off, she cleared the inner doors, and the outer lock failed, sending the Queen and the loader out into space. The Queen tumbled back toward Acheron, tearing at the machine as she went.

Back To The Cryotubes

Bishop's regulators stopped the flow of white blood along the tear. He lay on the hangar deck with his hands crossed and his eyes closed. Hicks had missed the fight on a pain shot Bishop had given him in the dropship. Ripley left Bishop where he was, brought a stretcher from Medical, and took Hicks to the ward.

She meant to put Hicks in a freezer once his vitals held and the acid burns had started to close. Three capsules were left to prep: Ripley, Newt, and Hicks. Bishop would not need one. The book ends on that sleep aboard the Sulaco, not on a salvage pickup and not with Jones in a box.

The Aliens

A Xenomorph Queen attached to her ovipositor while laying eggs

The book uses Alien, not Xenomorph. The adult fighters are Warriors in role, and Foster also puts a smaller drone caste on the Queen's egg line. Facehuggers in stasis looked like a tapered intestine. On Russ they were horseshoe-crab shapes with a palm tube and a coiled tail. The second form tears out through the ribs the way it did on the Nostromo, then the third form uses shafts, ceilings, and resin.

Bishop treated the tail sting as a neurotoxin, not a kill. Acid ate through decks, doors, Drake's armour, and the Sulaco lock. The Queen could drop her sac and keep fighting, and Ripley finished that fight with a loader and vacuum, not a rifle.

Key Characters

Colonial Marines and Ripley studying the Hadley's Hope map in Operations

Ellen Ripley was the consultant who lost her licence on Gateway, drove the APC into the hive, and finished the Queen in a power loader. She put Hicks, Newt, and herself into the Sulaco tubes.
Dwayne Hicks was the corporal who carried a family shotgun, took over after Apone, and lived with acid burns into hypersleep.
William Hudson was the Comtech Corporal who opened Hadley's Hope, set the sentries, and was dragged through the Operations floor.
Jenette Vasquez was the smartgunner who hid a power cell, then died on a grenade with Gorman.
Mark Drake was the other smartgunner. He kept a facial scar on purpose and died of acid on the APC ramp.
Apone was the master sergeant who burned the first Chestburster wall and went dark in the hive.
Scott Gorman was the lieutenant with almost no live drops. A tail sting paralyzed him, and he died with Vasquez.
Cynthia Dietrich was the medtech taken in the hive and left cocooned on the monitors.
Ricco Frost was burned alive when Dietrich's flamethrower went off in the grab.
Tim Crowe was taken in the hive and left low on the readouts with Dietrich.
Trevor Wierzbowski talked in the Sulaco mess and died in the hive.
Colette Ferro flew the dropship and died in the cockpit when an Alien slammed her into the console after the hive.
Daniel Spunkmeyer brought Bishop a pallet after the hive, slipped on slime on the ramp, and died on that ship before the crash.
Bishop was the Sulaco synthetic who crawled the acid pipe, flew the second dropship, and was torn in half on the hangar deck.
Burke was the Company man who hid live Facehuggers and was left cocooned in the hive wall with a grenade.
Newt was Rebecca Jorden, the last child in the ducts, taken to the Queen and pulled out by Ripley.
Jones was the ship cat who slept the Narcissus with Ripley and stayed on Earth.

Place In The Books

The novel is the second Alien book, published with the film in 1986, seven years after Foster's first novelization and six years before his Alien 3 book. The inquiry uses LV-426, while the colony scenes use Acheron. Later stories keep both names.

Warner Books released the first edition as a mass-market paperback in June 1986 at $3.95. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists 247 pages. The printed credit is a novel by Alan Dean Foster based on the screenplay by James Cameron, from a story by Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill, from characters created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett.

Futura published a UK paperback the same year at £2.50, also 247 pages. Warner's science-fiction book club issued a hardcover in November 1986 at 183 pages. Titan Books later kept the text in print as Aliens: The Official Movie Novelization, a 320-page paperback from April 2014. In October 1993, Warner UK and Sphere published The Complete Alien Omnibus, about 650 pages, binding this novel with Foster's Alien and Alien 3 books.

Behind The Scenes

Alan Dean Foster wrote from Cameron's screenplay after the 1979 Alien book. Warner timed the paperback for June, a month before the film. The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers later named him a Grand Master in 2008. He turned down Alien: Resurrection after fights on the third book, then came back for Alien: Covenant.

Foster's text keeps Jones on Earth, gives Acheron about thirty processors, and names Simpson, Lydecker, and Chester O. Ling at the colony. It also keeps Drake's scar, Hudson's Comtech rank, Wierzbowski's mess talk, Directive 6129, a ten-megaton fuse, and a drone caste on the Queen's line. Spunkmeyer's pallet run comes after the hive, the same order as the later Special Edition. The film keeps Jones on the Sulaco and a single atmosphere plant on the horizon.

Conclusion

Aliens is Alan Dean Foster's 1986 novel of the film, published by Warner Books. It covers Ellen Ripley and the Sulaco Marines from Gateway to the hangar, with a Queen that runs an egg line and a squad that does not come back intact. The book ends with the processor gone, the Queen in vacuum, and Ripley putting Hicks and Newt into the tubes.