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Alien 3 (Alien #3)

3.43 of 5 stars 3.43 · rating details · 334 ratings · 13 reviews

Les vents hurlent un chant de mort, des carcasses de vaisseaux spatiaux rouillent dans un paysage sans couleur, des vagues noires montent à l'assaut de rochers déchiquetés... C'est là, sur ce rivage désolé, que s'écrase la capsule de Ripley et de ses quatre compagnons, de retour de l'expédition contre les Aliens.
Seule Ripley survivra au crash. A son réveil, elle découvre l...more

Mass Market Paperback, 316 pages

Published September 4th 1992 by J'ai lu (first published May 1st 1990)

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Jun 08, 2012 trevorm rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

this book is good, but different from the movie, I will name some key differences. 1. The facehugger impregnates the ox instead of the dog. Riply wasn't attempted to be raped. 3. the Doctor isn't addicted to morphine. 4. theirs a lot more language then the book. 4. the xenomorph is (spoilered) differently then in the movie. 5. the chestburster doesn't come of of Riply while committing suicide. 6.the ending is different then the movie.

This book starts up pretty slow, when riply (the only survivor...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Hollowman rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

ADF's writing is on par with Aliens (#2) -- which is v. good. I don't think the story/screenplay/material he had to work with/go off was all that adaptable to novel form. And I don't think ADF was allowed to deviate much.
Unlike the other Alien novels in the trilogy, Alien 3 can be skipped -- the film works much better (and I liked it better than others have rated; it's orch. score by Goldenthal is esp. good and can't be "novelized").

On the topic of film-based adaptations and "novelization" ... "...more

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Feb 14, 2012 Donovan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, thriller

Alan Dean Foster continues to deliver the good on the Alien series with the 3rd instalment Alien 3 (not the most original title). This is a much better read and I recommend it to anyone who found the movie to be somewhat lacking. Again it has additional content that was not seen in the movie until the extended addition was released in 2006. It is much more gripping read than watching the movie and provides a much stronger sense of who the characters are. I don't recommend reading this without ha...more Alan Dean Foster continues to deliver the good on the Alien series with the 3rd instalment Alien 3 (not the most original title). This is a much better read and I recommend it to anyone who found the movie to be somewhat lacking. Again it has additional content that was not seen in the movie until the extended addition was released in 2006. It is much more gripping read than watching the movie and provides a much stronger sense of who the characters are. I don't recommend reading this without having read the previous novels as there is too much back-history to brush over and could leave the reader asking WTF?!?! There are some ironic twists and strong turns in the story and Foster executes them perfectly in a setting that is new to the series.
Not as scary as Alien, not as action-packed as Aliens but just as thought provoking and entertaining as both. Some readers can pass on this but if you are a fan, then I think you will enjoy the novel.

Plot ***Spoilers***
Following the events in Aliens, the Colonial Marine spaceship Sulaco experiences an onboard fire and launches an escape pod containing Ellen Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and the damaged android Bishop who are all in cryonic stasis. During the launch, the ship's medical scans of the crew's cryotubes show an Alien facehugger attached to one of the crewmembers. The pod then crashes on Fiorina 'Fury' 161, a foundry facility and penal colony inhabited by all-male inmates with "double-Y" chromosome patterns and histories of physical and sexual violence. After some inmates recover the pod and its passengers, an Alien facehugger is seen approaching the prison dog. Ripley is taken in and awakened by Clemens, the prison doctor, and is told she is the only survivor of the crash. Many of the ex-inmates have embraced an apocalyptic, millenarian version of Christianity, and Ripley is warned by the prison warden, Harold Andrews, that her presence among them may have extremely disruptive effects.

Suspicious of what caused the escape pod to jettison and what killed her companions, Ripley requests that Clemens perform an autopsy on Newt. She fears that Newt may be carrying an Alien embryo in her body, though she does not share this information. Despite protests from the warden and his assistant, Aaron, the autopsy is conducted. No embryo is found in Newt's body, and Clemens proclaims she simply died in the crash. Meanwhile, Ripley's unusual behavior begins to frustrate the warden and is agitating the prisoners.

A funeral is performed for Newt and Hicks, in which their bodies are cremated in the facility's enormous furnace. In another section of the facility, the prison dog enters convulsions, and an Alien bursts from its body. The Alien soon begins to attack members of the colony, killing several and returning an outcast prisoner Golic to his former deranged state. To get answers, Ripley recovers and reactivates the damaged android Bishop, who confirms that there was an Alien on the Sulaco and it came with them to Fiorina in the escape pod. She then informs Andrews of her previous encounters with the Aliens and suggests everyone work together to hunt it down and kill it. Andrews does not believe her story and explains that the facility has no weapons. Their only hope of protection is the rescue ship being sent for Ripley by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.

Back in the prison infirmary, while talking to Ripley about the situation, Clemens is killed by the Alien, but when it is about to attack Ripley, it suddenly pauses, then retreats, mysteriously sparing her life. She runs to the mess hall to warn the others, only to see the Alien kill the warden. Ripley rallies the inmates and proposes they pour highly flammable toxic waste, which is stored at the facility, into the ventilation system and ignite it to flush out the creature. An explosion is caused by the creature's premature intervention, resulting in several deaths. Using the medical equipment aboard the Sulaco escape pod, Ripley scans herself and discovers the embryo of an Alien Queen growing inside her. She also finds out that the Corporation truly wants the Queen embryo and the adult Alien, hoping to turn them into biological weapons. Deducing that the mature alien will not kill her because of the embryo she carries, Ripley begs Dillon, the religious leader of the inmates, to kill her, who agrees to do so only if she helps the inmates kill the adult creature first. They form a plan to lure it into the foundry's molding facility and drown it in molten lead by trapping it by closing a series of doors. The bait-and-chase style plan results in the death of Dillon and all the remaining prisoners, except Morse, who pours the lead. The Alien, covered in molten metal, escapes the mold and is killed by Ripley when she turns on fire sprinklers and sprays the beast with water, causing its exoskeleton to cool rapidly and shatter via thermal shock.

While Ripley battles the Alien, the Weyland-Yutani team arrives, including a man named Michael Bishop who looks identical to the Bishop android, claiming to be its creator. He tries to persuade Ripley to undergo surgery to remove the Queen embryo, which he claims will be destroyed. Ripley refuses and steps back onto a mobile platform, which Morse positions over the furnace. The company men shoot Morse in the leg, and Aaron picks up a large wrench and strikes Bishop over the head with it. Aaron is shot dead, and Bishop and his men show their true intentions, begging Ripley to let them have the "magnificent specimen". Ripley defies them by throwing herself into the gigantic furnace, just as the alien Queen begins to erupt from her chest. As she dies from the wound, Ripley grabs the creature, holding on to it as she falls into the fire.

The novel concludes with a sequence describing the facility being closed down, the last surviving inmate, Morse, being led away, and of the Sulaco escape pod as the sound recording of Ripley's final lines from the original Alien film is heard.(less)

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Jul 09, 2009 J.M. rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: speculative-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Started re-reading this before I realized I'd read it before. It's a quick read, nothing earth-shattering, but a very good novelization of the movie.

The Alien series has to be among my favorite films, and this adds another dimension to them in that Ripley now becomes "part of the family," so to speak ~ in getting impregnated, she becomes the very same alien which she's tried so hard to kill in the last two books.

One thing I enjoy about reading novelizations of films is that the reader gets a ch...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Derrick rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, movie-tie-in, own, scifi, ultra-violence

Several years ago I bought a truckload of books from some guy on Craigslist. A ton of hardcovers and a bunch of paperbacks.

I put the majority of them up on Paperbackswap.com and got rid of them, but I still have about 2-3 shelves of books I haven't been able to get rid off. In the wintertime I can't take my ereader to work [as I work outside and sub-freezing weather doesn't agree with the ereader], so I fall back on paperbooks.

I've seen Aliens, so wanted to see what happened after and I needed a...more

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Feb 27, 2011 Ana Mardoll rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Alien 3 (Film Novelization) / 0-446-36216-6

I had the highest hopes for this "Alien 3" novel because I always felt that certain parts of the movie were confusing, and I hoped that this novel would clear up those points. In this respect, the book shines brightly - carefully explaining how the facehugger in the Sulaco caused the acid burn on Newt's cryo chamber, and why the electrical fire started and forced the chambers into the escape pod, an opening sequence that always left me a bit bewildered....more Alien 3 (Film Novelization) / 0-446-36216-6

I had the highest hopes for this "Alien 3" novel because I always felt that certain parts of the movie were confusing, and I hoped that this novel would clear up those points. In this respect, the book shines brightly - carefully explaining how the facehugger in the Sulaco caused the acid burn on Newt's cryo chamber, and why the electrical fire started and forced the chambers into the escape pod, an opening sequence that always left me a bit bewildered. The birth of the alien warrior is also explained more carefully than I felt it was in the movie - one of the worker animals used to recover the pod wreckage (in this case an ox, not a dog) was impregnated and the apparently lifeless corpse was dragged back to the prison's abattoir, where the alien was born in relative privacy. It is also carefully explained why Ripley didn't initially believe she was infected, how she knows the alien she is carrying is a queen when she does discover it, and why the queen doesn't emerge as quickly as the warriors do - little details that always bugged me when I'd watch the movie.

As far as overall quality, however, I have to say that the source movie is better, particularly in the area of character development. In the book, Ripley displays an unusual combination of squeamishness and vanity, refusing to shave her head until the lice problem becomes painfully manifest. That seems incredibly out of character for Ripley at this point in her life, and I'm grateful that the movie didn't belabor that point. Clemens, too, displays a strange oscillation of character, bouncing from impossibly patient and good-natured to rather pouty and belligerent for no apparent reason, and I preferred the unruffled, even calmness of the actor in the movie, which seems better suited to the situation. It's also not clear whether Clemens is still serving his sentence as a prisoner (Andrews claims he is, and the book reinforces this idea several times), or whether he is a free man who has chosen to stay on as the medical staff (as Clemens himself claims). The movie doesn't present this ambiguity and it feels less like a deliberate moral question on the status of Clemens and more like an accidental mistake in the script.

For good or ill, the Ripley in the novel takes great pains to confirm that the company does in fact want the alien alive, a point that is deliberately left vague in the movie until the final point of no return. In some ways this is good because it underscores that Ripley is an intelligent survivor who isn't the type to throw her life away based on mere hunches, but in other ways this change is bad because it strips away the anxiety that Ripley might be wrong, might be wasting her life in her final gesture. That Ripley might be wrong does not necessarily paint her as reckless so much as a woman driven by her conviction - she is willing to sacrifice her life for the certainty that the aliens are destroyed, rather than save her life and merely hope that the company will do the right thing. Of course, the movie cops out with Bishops final plea, showing us that Ripley has been right all along, but the book strips out even the possibility that Ripley might have doubts, and I'm not certain that addition is a good one.

I definitely recommend reading this novel if you are a fan of the series, particularly if you've read Foster's novelizations of the first two movies. Just be aware that there are some flaws here, but the explanation of some of the more mysterious parts of the movie make the read well worth it.

~ Ana Mardoll(less)

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May 17, 2012 Brian Grinter rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

disappointing book for a disappointing film. Considering they're all written by Alan Dean Foster there was a lot of inconsistencies between the facts in the book. In Alien, LV426 was 6mths travel from Earth. In Aliens, it was 2 weeks out - fair enough, technology improved while Ripley was in suspended animation. Yet in Alien 3 it talk about interstellar travel taking many years?

All in all, not a great read.

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Dec 10, 2010 Peregrine 12 rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: No one.

Shelves: avoid-at-all-costs

I'm a fan of Alien/Aliens movies, but this was a huge letdown. Somehow there was virtually no suspense in the entire story, and I quickly grew bored with the plot, however original the setting. Is this what happens when a book is based on a screenplay?

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Mar 10, 2012 Kathryn rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, movie-novelization, sci-fi-fantasy

I picked up the book-on-tape version of "Alien 3" because it was read by Lance Henriksen. And that's...pretty much the only thing I can say about this, good or otherwise. The story made absolutely no impression on me

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Dec 10, 2010 Sandyboy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science, fiction

interesting for including scenes that didn't make it into the final movie

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Aug 25, 2010 Andy added it · review of another edition

Shelves: x_from_andylib, genre_science_fiction, yop1992, yed1992, location-box-0010

1ST BRITISH EDITION

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Nov 30, 2012 Gabriel Mero rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A faithful adaption to the movie.

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Aug 23, 2008 bluetyson added it · review of another edition

isbn,original

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May 23, 2013 Larry Clinton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 22, 2013 Dennis Cooper rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 21, 2013 Rizwan Khalil marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: novelization, science-fiction, horror-thrillers

May 20, 2013 Юрій Несин rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 15, 2013 Rhoobarb rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 15, 2013 Sean rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 14, 2013 Sergio rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

May 10, 2013 Derek Glidewell is currently reading it · review of another edition

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Shelves: daddy-dark-s-baby-warrior-list

May 03, 2013 Sally Lundsten rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Apr 30, 2013 Benjamin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Apr 25, 2013 Jack Hansen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Apr 25, 2013 AnnaM rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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About Alan Dean Foster

Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California. He received a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. in 1969. Foster lives in Arizona with his wife, but he enjoys traveling because it gives him opportunities to meet new people and explore new places and cultures. This interest is carried over to his writing,...more

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