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If you ever want to see how much movie novelizations have changed in the last forty years, you can't go wrong with Alan Dean Foster's work. Pick up his adaptations of the most recent Star Trek movies and you'll find what is essentially just the script reformatted to prose form -- and not just any script, but the final draft continuity script. No deleted scenes, no character development based upon production notes, and certainly no original input from the author.

But go back to the novelizations he did in the '70s -- Star Wars, Alien, Star Trek the Animated Series and (allegedly) Star Trek: The Motion Picture: A Novel -- and you'll find something completely different. Alien is a perfect case in point. Working with what's obviously an early draft of the script (he includes deleted scenes, like Dallas and Brett being turned into eggs) and only having access to concept art by Giger and Cobb, the result is vastly different from the finished film. The facehugger has eyes and suckers, Ash has circuit boards and wires instead of milk and spaghetti, and Kane acts like Scrooge McDuck expecting to find rich stuff inside the derelict. Some of the material is obviously original to Foster, particularly the opening passage, in which he discusses a form of future entertainment, pre-fab dreams.

The book's nothing special, though it's certainly competent, and any fan of the franchise should pick it up just for the alternate take on everything (which is ultimately more like the non-director's cut Scott put out for the 25th anniversary).