Leading from
(Still Collating)
a) Intentions
I wanted to start assembling a story based on the universe of Alien but the idea of actually creating Alien fan fiction or a script in itself seemed to be the most idiotic thing in this day and age, and although I could create some interesting sketches, I was not a good enough as an illustrator to create a comic book or a set of credible storyboards. Meanwhile this thing almost wants to turn into an elongated novel that would have very little to do with the Alien Saga. As it goes I have little interest in Colonial marines battling with alien hives full of alien soldiers, drones and queens. I am perhaps more interested in the creativity that went into the first movie, the abstract result of the third movie and indeed the hallucinatory quality of some of the scenes of the fourth movie.
b) Starting point
A starting point for me was the idea of paleontologists/archeologists as with the characters from the original 1950s Quatermass And The Pit TV series which was later remade in the 1960s as a movie being brought across the galaxy to take a look at an anomaly. It's presence was threatening another secret operation on the planet. Perhaps the remnants of another alien civilisation had been discovered and they wanted to keep it quiet. Perhaps the male archeologist was put there as a fake just to debunk the whole possibility that the anomaly was anything more than the fossil of a long extinct sea creature rather than the remnants of some strange technology. His assistant is a woman who seems to either be a robot or a cyborg because soon it is revealed that one of her arms is cybernetic with various sensory instruments useful for archeology and paleontology. Perhaps there is a question about whether this woman is human or machine after all the controversy about whether Bishop 2 was human or machine, and perhaps she is a replacement of someone that the male character knew.
I had the idea of naming the male character Rollerbeck , perhaps loosely derived from the name of a French writer Michel Houellebecq who wrote a book about H P Lovecraft, or maybe it has more to do with the Black + Decker company name or even Rickenbacker guitar which was also a surname of a character played by Jean-Claude Van Damme in Cyborg.
c) A Cabal
I had the idea that a cabal of some sort working within the company had a holographic galactic map showing the placement of all their space ships. Something interesting was showing up on the holographic display and various people are brought out of cryogenic suspension who have been waiting for something interesting to come up and have been put into sleep state until it happened. I thought about the character Bishop 2 being one of these people and I thought about him being someone that they would send across the galaxy to retrieve the thing to be recovered, and then I thought that perhaps he could be replaced by someone else, someone who was hanging onto his job.
Originally this group of people found some sort of ancient extra-terrestrial relic from somewhere in space and found out that this thing performed calculations for when and where time capsules left behind by an ancient civilisation would suddenly turn up across the galaxy and it was up to these people to intercept them and if possible bring them back to Earth. It made it seem as if there was some sort of conspiracy going on.
Perhaps I am also thinking about Call of the Cthulhu in Space because I probably have the idea of a powerful alien being imprisoned in the depths of space and time somewhere and is using abstract means to ensure that he escapes, or revives some element of itself in another era. I also know about the character Hastur imprisoned somewhere in the depths of space. And so it is organising its escape while the people helping it to escape all think that they are going to profit from helping it.
d) Retrieval
There is a signal coming from a certain point in space, one party go into chase it and then suddenly an alien presence infects the ship, someone suddenly sheds his skin to become a strange shadowy monstrous thing that destroys the rest of the people aboard, and this might all be a little too like an episode of Space 1999. Meanwhile the Bishop 2 character meanwhile goes chasing the signal in the same area and his crew are spared the misfortune of the others, as if something beyond wanted them to find the artifact, and the journey leads to a planetoid where they discover a graveyard full of giant skeletons in glass coffins, half buried in dust across the planetoid landscape and there a building in the centre of the landscape where they find their time capsule. A giant in a sarcophagus that the closer they stand to it, the more they become over powered by its presence and become unsure as to whether they are standing near or within the actual sarcophagus itself. The sarcophagus has been designed to be moved along a track, they push it along the track to the mouth of the cave and out to a platform where a spacecraft is there to pick the thing up. They bring the sarcophagus back to an Earth base, and all I could have as an idea after that is that they revive the entity inside, a space jockey with a sommelier knife shaped body, and they have the intention of milking it for technical secrets which is what they sort it had been sent to them for, and then the thing suddenly dies on them, they wonder what the point of that was, but in its dying moment releases something, perhaps another galactic map to infuriate people, or does that lead to the presence of an alien city on a distant planetoid somewhere.
Probably in a movie someone might want to cut half of this part of it out or merge it together and perhaps something even more confusing might come out of it. The idea might be that they go to retrieve the sarcophagus, they revive it on the ship, its presence suddenly acts as a catalyst for people's DNA changing and they become dark monsters shedding their human skin killing everything around leading to Bishop 2 making an escape by an escape shuttle or he too dies.
e) Time capsules
I had the idea that somehow there was an ancient civilisation in the depths of time that wanted to send its cargo through time and space in the form of a time capsule and that would be the derelict ship in Alien as well as other things. This civilisation would either have been on a mission to save its own species, or declare war on the human race, or just mess around with the lives of a few individuals who that story centres round destroying everything in their lives, and the only way to end the story would be that this ancient intelligence would suddenly move its interests on to something or someone else. (The concept would perhaps have been too much like the Terminator concept with Skynet sending robots back in time to kill off the person who started off the person who started off the resistance group who are dedicated to destroying it.)
f) Christian Fundamentalists
Christian Fundamentalists are always around to warn people of the dangers of using technology from recovered extra-terrestrial vehicles, telling people that it all comes from the devil and that anything to do with extra-terrestrials is temptation from the devil. And then there is the space jockey from the depths of time leaving time capsules with technology parcels for the people in that modern world to make use of and feel as if they are getting something out of the mysterious communications from the entity from the past. So the Christian Fundamentalists in space will be proven right to everyone's annoyance but will surely be destroyed in the process of doing so.
g) Looking for a new beast
What the point of the alien was though is a question I couldn't work out, other than to fulfill the fantasy of a monster wandering around the corridors killing people and I really didn't have those kinds of thoughts. I had seen where Giger's alien had come from, a fusion of ideas such as the "Eye of Horus", Ernst Fuchs "The Angel of Death", Dali's warped images such as Soft Construction with Boiled Beans ( Premonition of Civil War), and perhaps his sketch of Nefertiti. I suppose by now it must be something that at first seems unspecific but comes together to reveal itself as the ultimate horror. I always wanted to see an alien monster that was a combination of a dozen organisms all fused together to make one larger entity. Perhaps at least several people give birth to parts of the one larger creature.
h) The ever changing face
However the alien beast was presented in the story as some apocalyptic horror with an ever transforming face and body, it's presence endangers an archeological dig which the Company wants to save for its own purposes, and the male hero is out to try his best to document all the changes in the creature as if it were an important language being communicated answering questions to the soul.
The female assistant has to drag him away to an escape ship while the creature slaughters hundreds of soldiers sent in to kill it. But this final beast was for some reason the ever changing face of the devil and something to not hang around for too long, perhaps Rollerbeck's life was being sucked out by the whole association. Then perhaps in Alien Resurrection, there was the scientist Doctor Gediman forever wishing to document the last parts of the alien life cycle resulting in the alien queen giving birth to the newborn that comes along and kills Doctor Gediman. Nothing of any intended story is really that new but permutations of older things and quite unbearable in that way but still perhaps there is something still personal for the writer coming through the resulting story.
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