Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alien and Aliens, (Cubed can be dropped into the sea with the tesseract and Resurrection feels like a beta-edition of Firefly), I watched the first film during its

Alien and images are copyrights of 20th Century Fox

premier run in theaters and aside from the chest-buster in the moment before it sped away reminding me of Michigan J. Frog it excelled as a horror film, but there are elements in the pop culture surrounding the films that rub me the wrong way.

Xenomorph: I hate, hate, hate that people call the titular alien Xenomorph. First off Gorman used the term in Aliens, ‘a xenomorph may be involved’ clearly as a generic classification for any alien lifeform since aside from Ripley no one had ever seen or reported this beastie before. So, Bob, I hear you cry what should we call it? In the years before ‘xenomorph, hell before James Cameron’s Aliens was released me and my gaming group had a quite rational name for this thing, the Zeta Reticulan Parasite, since it was discovered at Zeta 2 Reticuli.

Flame Throwers: In the sequels that followed the titanic success of the first film there has been repeated reliance on using flame as a weapon to corral and herd the parasite. Good God people flame and flame throwers are useless against the creature. You can see how well they helped the first crew. Fire didn’t save one and there’s a very rational and simple reason for this. Ash was a fucking robot out to do the company’s bidding and when he suggested fire he was lying and not giving actually good advice. He already understood that it layers of silicon would help protect it against flame and fire.

A Killing Machine: From Cubed onward through Resurrection and the crossovers with the Predator franchise the parasite has been reduced to a slasher, killing to kill without motivation or purpose. In Alien and Aliens, it was following its lifecycle, not killing save when it was forced to or cornered, but breeding, reproducing. While Cameron deviated from O’Bannon’s original intent and planned lifecycle with the introduction of the Queen, O’Bannon had planned that captured organisms were cocooned and slowly transformed directly into the eggs that Kane has discovered, it still worked quite well as a highly unlikely but still credible cycle for the organism to follow. However, in the following movies the beast kills to kill and provided shock in place of horror.

Well, that enough ranting to kick off September.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,