Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction horror film Alien is about to hit cinemas again to celebrate the 45th anniversary of its release. It's also meant to whet cinemagoers' appetites for the upcoming Alien: Romulus film directed by Fede Álvarez.
I first saw this classic movie when I was about 9 or 10 years old. This was with my parents' blessing I might add, though I wasn't supposed to see the famous dinner table scene (I did see it however, due to my eyes being poorly covered). Something about the film went deep into the psyche of the impressionable child I was. To me, it's much more than just a slasher / haunted house movie set in space; it's a parable for the struggle to survive in the face of the unknown. Alien is the reason I've always wanted to write a horror novel set on a spaceship, though I wanted to raise the stakes way above the lives of seven crew members and a ship's cat.
Xeno is that novel, which was released in 2019. I set out wanting to match Ridley Scott's movie in several respects, especially when it came to three things:
the narrative not being character-driven;
the alien threat being other-worldly yet entirely logical in form;
the crew simply being unaware of what they're up against from the start, rather than being total morons who are dead set on making mindless mistakes (it's a well-known fact that moronic victims who act contrary to all reason tend to plague horror and sci-fi films).
I don't know how successful I've been with these goals. Alien is an audiovisual experience, while Xeno is not. It's difficult to write a whole novel without including characters' backstories, motivations and internal dialogues. I should have known it would be a tall order from the beginning. While I've read all of Alan Dean Foster's Alien novelisations (except his Alien: Covenant prequel) and enjoyed them, they can't hope to reproduce the visceral impact of Ridley Scott's visuals, nor the ambience of Jerry Goldsmith's score. The written word is a different medium to film, and I don't know if I'll ever read a horror novel that affects me as much as Alien has.
Whatever the original intention behind Xeno, I gave my Alien-inspired novel my best shot. Fans of the Alien franchise will probably enjoy spotting the parallels between my book and the films. Often I've paraphrased or outright pinched whole lines of dialogue. Other times the influences are more obscure and harder to spot unless you're an aficionado of the films (for example, one of my ship's crew is named after a character who reportedly got dropped from Alien early in its production). Of course, being an Alien superfan isn't a prerequisite for reading Xeno. I hope those with just a love of horror and/or science fiction will enjoy it too. The synopsis for the book is:
The huge spaceship the Xeno is en route to a new world light years from Earth, its payload of more than 50,000 cryogenically frozen colonists watched over by a supercomputer and a skeleton crew of only a dozen people.
When the ship comes into contact with a seemingly inert alien artefact drifting in space, the crew believes they have made a momentous discovery for all humankind. They’re unaware it’s the eve of true horror.
Soon it becomes clear the crew has unwittingly woken an evil so ancient and so powerful it threatens not only the ship and its slumbering passengers, but the future of the human race itself.
Xeno is available from book stockists. The story is ripe for sequels (as the Xeno ship was followed into space by Xeno II and Xeno III), though I don't know at the moment if they will be written. If you would like to read a sequel, please let me know.
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