Alien: Out of the Shadows by Tim Lebbon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I am usually leery of any movie novelisations or tie-ins. However, the recent announcement that South African director Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) had been given the green light by Fox to film his long-gestating Alien project coincided with my discovery of this Alien novel by Tim Lebbon, a respected fantasy and horror author. (There are two more in what is a loose trilogy, by James A. Moore and Christopher Golden). And being in the mood for a popcorn read, I thought, how bad can it be?
To my surprise, this was hugely enjoyable and accomplished – despite a half-assed marketing attempt by Titan Books to bill as this a direct sequel to Alien. Which I suppose means it is a prequel to Aliens. (Which also gives a wry nod to some of the more outré excesses of Prometheus, if you are not confused enough already).
Any fan of the movies knows, of course, that Ripley’s appearance in such a book is totally illogical: Lebbon’s answer to this dilemma is the only misstep in a generally assured and confident horror novel.
The 1979 movie by Ridley Scott – and let us not forget H.R Giger’s Alien design – is one of the greatest SF movies ever made, revelling in the genre’s gothic and pulp origins. Indeed, the Alien creature has become as iconic as Jaws, King Kong or E.T. The Extraterrestrial.
One of the greatest attributes of the Alien creature is its mystery and savagery, combined with its ability to evoke both awe and a weird sexual frisson – Scott masterfully introduced all these elements into his original movie.
Subsequent sequels tended to focus on a single element at the expense of all the others: action in Aliens, martyrdom in Alien 3, and who knows what-the-fuck in Alien Resurrection. Scott’s own Prometheus (2012) raised its nose disdainfully at the schlockier elements of his seminal original, and was a pretentious failure as a result.
Lebbon’s continuation of the original story – what happens to Ripley (and let us not forget Jonesy the ship’s cat, as well as the more-corporate-than-thou Weyland-Yutani) after they escape from the Nostromo in a shuttle craft is positioned somewhere between Aliens and Alien 3 in terms of tone and effect.
There is sufficient action to please even the most diehard movie fan, but the real achievement here is how nuanced the characters are, and what insight we get into Ripley. Surprisingly, Ripley herself has remained as much a cipher as the Alien creature itself: more a means to an end (elaborate death and destruction on a galactic scale) than a flesh-and-blood person.
Lebbon gives Ripley a nicely textured palette of pathos, anger and terror. In addition, he wisely resists the temptation to write a by-the-numbers book explaining the origin and evolution of the Alien culture: all we get are tantalising, and sometimes awe-inducing, glimpses.
Given how good this novel is – how it manages to tell a gripping, character-driven story in which a bunch of disparate characters have to deal with a terrifying manifestation of the Unknown – it remains one of the more perplexing mysteries of Hollywood as to how it has managed to fuck-up all the sequels from Alien 3 onwards. Let us hope Blomkamp and his team restore Ripley to her rightful place.
A Book Lover's Discourse 