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The third film in Twentieth Century Fox's Alien franchise had an infamously troubled and difficult production. After the critical and financial success of the first two films, a third film continuing the story was inevitable. In 1987 the acclaimed science fiction writer William Gibson, know as a pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, was commissioned to write a screenplay. That screenplay was rewritten into a second draft. That draft was later thrown out for a completely new script by a different writer. That script was promptly replaced by an entirely new script, which was itself tossed aside by another team of writers. You get the idea. The version of Alien 3 that finally made it to screen was an ambitious mess that bares no resemblance to the original discarded draft. And so the original Alien 3 script has floated around the Alien fandom for decades, taking on a nostalgic kind of life of its own. The film that COULD have been. The Alien 3 that we SHOULD have gotten, if only Fox hadn't tossed it away. I never read that script, but I was intrigued when I heard that it was about an Alien arms race with space communists. That sounded pretty fun.

Whelp, here is a novelization of that original first draft screenplay that was never made, fleshed out into book form by sci-fi author Pat Cadigan. It has a very interesting premise that revolves around the "United Progressive Peoples" (space communists) getting their hands on some Alien DNA, leading to a biological arms race with the villainous capitalists of the Weyland-Yutani corporation. If you've ever seen an Alien movie you can guess what happens next.

The space commie plotline is very amusing, and one that I really wish was developed in the films. I also wish it was further developed in this novel, because once the arms race kicks off the communist space colony really has no further role to play in the plot. It is still a great expansion of the Alien universe; I always wondered if there were any other societies that had left earth besides the one dominated by the seemingly omnipresent Weyland-Yutani company. The biological engineering of the Alien DNA is also a welcome and interesting plotline; it gives us new insight into the Alien lifeforms and develops new freaky little Alien fellas to terrorize the human characters.

Unfortunately once the inevitable breach happens and the Aliens are loosed on the space station, the novel becomes extremely messy and formulaic. There are still some fun suspense sequences that I imagine would have been really cool to see on the big screen, but it's mostly just the usual Alien shenanigans. "Aliens show up. Kill some perfunctory characters. Survivors have to run and hide in a space station." Rinse. Repeat.

A lot of fun and creative ideas for the Alien franchise, and I think this could have made for the basis of a great third Alien film if they had given it another edit or two and placed the script in the hands of a capable director, but this book is really only interesting as a curio. A window into a possible movie that we will never see. Unless you are a diehard fan of the franchise this is not really worth exploring.