Alan Dean Foster has been a key part of many different franchises for over forty years, novelising and writing original stories from Star Wars, Star Trek and Alien – including two books connected to the most recent movie in that franchise, Alien: Covenant. Titan Books has just published the second book, Origins, which sets the scene for Ridley Scott’s movie – in a way that may come as a surprise to many. Paul Simpson caught up with Foster on Skype in late September…

Alien: Covenant: Origins really wasn’t what I was expecting at all…

It wasn’t what I was expecting!

Did the two books come as a package, or were you asked to do the novelisation first and then the prequel?

It came as a package but the contents of the package were not yet determined.

Originally there was talk of a sequel then it was decided that a sequel would interfere with anything that Ridley [Scott] or anybody else might want to do in another film, which is obvious, so it was determined to go as a prequel. A number of things were discussed that I would be permitted to write about and obviously things were mentioned that it would be preferred that I did not write about.

So essentially I wrote what I was asked to write. Various storylines and ideas were discussed between myself, the publisher and the studio, after which the basics of the existing prequel were settled upon and I was then sent off to write what I wanted to write within that context.

I did wonder if this was going to be a backdoor novelisation of Prometheus…

I’ve gotten an awful lot of emails asking if I could write a novelisation of Prometheus, and of course there was a novelisation of Prometheus, apparently, that only came out in Japan. [Written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, it was published in 2012.] It would be an odd sort of footnote in publishing history if a novelisation had already been written of a film and a second one would be written from a completely different viewpoint. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Setting a good part in Great Britain was also something of a surprise – I never expected to see the words “Isle of Wight” in an Aliens story. 

I always pride myself in doing my research, whatever I’m writing, and it just seemed to me an obvious place for Peter Weyland to have his headquarters and be from, so everything followed from that. If Weyland Incorporated is in Britain, then based on what the storyline was determined, much of the rest of it should take place in Britain.

What I was allowed to do, which really pleased me, was develop the other side of the company, Yutani. That allowed me to jump halfway around the planet to Tokyo and do an awful lot of stuff about a future Japan…

The idea of it being Weyland in Prometheus, then Weyland-Yutani in Covenant and going forward into the rest of the Alien saga has been something that’s to the best of my knowledge not been tackled before; were there any guidelines from the movies you had to follow, or did you pretty much have carte blanche?

On that part, I had complete freedom and I was allowed to develop everything on that end of the story and that end of the company, which I hope opens up for fans and perhaps for other writers a whole other aspect of the Weyland-Yutani company that, as you say, hasn’t been explored yet.

We know a little bit about “contemporary” Earth from the movies – did you have the same freedom in developing how it had got to this industrial state?

I was left alone to explore that, and that did lead from Prometheus and the way the Earth, or at least a large part of it, supposedly looks at that time.

I was intrigued by the thought that so much urbanisation is going on right now. People everywhere on the planet tend to move from the countryside to the city because farming is not what it once was and the money is to be made in the cities.

I ran with that a little bit for the planetary background in Origins, with the idea that the cities are pretty miserable places, and because they’re miserable places their misery extends out into the countryside – but if you look far enough and you go far enough away from the main cities, you can still find little pockets of things like Olde England that still look the same.

People still have to eat and at least I saw it that way in this story, you still have to be able, however mechanised the world is, to grow food and to raise farm animals. That led me to obvious things that you’ve read in the story, and I was able to tie the city into the countryside and develop a little bit of futuristic look at urbanisation and what’s left of rural Britain at least.

The Prophet is also not what you’d expect – you’re expecting acolytes and someone revered. This guy feels more like a clerk at the bank…

That’s exactly what I was aiming for. He’s not Jim Jones, and he’s not Ayatollah Khomeini; he’s a regular guy who has been afflicted. What he’s been afflicted with I’ve left deliberately open so that the reader can make up their own mind about what exactly is going on.

But the visions are tied into the franchise perhaps, rather than just Covenant…

(pause) If you choose to see his visions that way, yes. His visions are deliberately not specific as to anatomical details, so the reader is left thinking, “What is he really seeing?”

And we’re filtering it through the movie…

But it could be something else; it could be exactly spot-on; it could be something related to the movies that we haven’t seen yet… It’s all very open to the reader’s interpretation and that’s deliberate.

Were you working on the the two books simultaneously?

No, the novelisation was completed because they needed it right away for publication reasons and then I went to work on Origins.

If someone goes back and rereads the novelisation now, are there little Easter eggs, or Alien eggs, waiting there for them to be able to pick up?

I don’t think so because nothing had been settled for Origins before I finished the novelisation so you’re not likely to find anything in the novelisation that gives a taste of Origins. However, since it is a prequel, there are a great many things in Origins that foreshadow what happens in the novel and the movie.

And it felt like there were a few places where you were sorting out elements of the movie…

Exactly. That’s the way you tie the prequel into the film. That was one of the most pleasurable parts of doing the prequel was knowing what comes after and being able to write original material that leads up to the film.

Was it your choice to centre Origins on Sergeant Lopé or was that something that Fox pushed towards?

That was my call. I really like the character because he’s essentially a mercenary. He’s ex-military.

The whole status of the military in the world of Alien and on Earth is kind of nebulous because you have this idea that the great power stand-offs don’t exist in the way they do today – maybe they’ve been settled a little bit – so you can’t really say he’s part of the United States Army. So he’s military, and there are his police aspects too,

I really like the character because in the film he comes off as the tradesman who is really dedicated to his craft. He’s the one guy who is like, “This is my job.” If you’re doing a military film, there’s always the sergeant who quietly sneers at the officers and their affectations and says, “You guys do all the strategizing you want but these are my guys and my girls and I’m going to make sure they get out of this alive no matter what you determine.” That’s the way I saw Sergeant Lopé.

The hardest part of writing Sergeant Lopé was going through Microsoft Word and putting an accented é in every time!

Lopé is sort of the Michael Ironside character from a few years ago – that was perhaps who I envisaged more in the novel.

If you want an analogue for Lopé: remember the film Zulu, a great film? He’s the sergeant major.

The novelisation was your return to the Alien universe after 25 or so years. Did it feel unusual after all that time or was it like when we discussed your return to Star Trek a few years back, that it felt like going back to something you were very familiar with?

Yes. For some reason when I do these with a long gap between one book and another one in the series or the franchise, things tend to sit around. I have a good hard drive and things come to the fore pretty easily. So although things were pretty different in terms of the setting and the ships and everything else, it didn’t feel like much time had lapsed at all.

How much time did you have to work on the novelisation? A month or six weeks?

Can I put a minus in front of the number? (laughs)

What happens these days in film is you can edit a film right up to the day it opens practically because it’s all digital. Publishers can’t do that; they can with ebooks, but not print books. They have to be copy edited, they have to be printed, the cover has to be designed, everything has to be bound, they have to be loaded on trucks and trains and shipped to bookstores who have to put them out… It can’t be done at the last minute. It’s more a question of the publisher needing as much lead time as possible.

I think I had two months, and I finished it in a number of weeks. It went fairly quickly. It’s like riding a bike or playing a piano – when you’ve done something for a long time there are certain things you don’t have to think about. Your body remembers, your mind remembers. It went pretty quick.

The original novel took considerably longer of course.

Would you like to return to the Alien universe?

For as many of these things as I’ve done, for as many decades as I’ve done them, I always have this faint hope at the back of my mind, for the fans if nothing else, that some studio producer somewhere will look around and say, “Hey we’re on the fifth film in this series, the ninth film or whatever, and this guy has been working on this stuff since the beginning. Maybe we ought to let him take a shot at at least a preliminary screenplay.”

I guarantee you I have ideas! I have ideas for the next Alien film but nobody asks me. Nobody asks me about Star Wars or Star Trek or anything else. “He’s the guy who does the novelisations and the spin-offs”, and that’s fine. But I’ve written screenplays too and I know from decades of working in these franchises and writing in them that I have a pretty good idea of what the fans would like to see and I would love to have the opportunity to do it.

That said, I’m real happy, all things being equal, to work in the print version of the Alien universe too.

Did you see the new Star Trek show, Discovery last night?

I did not have a chance to watch last night but will catch it later.

Prequels are the hardest thing to do. The easiest thing is original material, starting from scratch, then sequels are harder because you’ve already given away the basic setting and maybe some of the characters, and prequels are much harder to do because people know everything that’s going to happen afterwards. Most of your suspense is gone before you’ve gotten to page 1.

It’s really tough to bring off a prequel. I wish them luck and I hope they do well.

Every time they revive Star Trek, it seems like it’s more and more “blow things up big”, and less and less “solve a problem with your brain”, and maybe there’s a little action, maybe there’s a moral point or a philosophical point or a political point to it. It’s not just “these are the bad guys, these are the good guys, and let’s just turn things over to the CGI folks and make things blow up nice”.

There’s an interesting interview with [Discovery co-creator] Alex Kurtzman talking about this – in the movies they had to be more black and white; they can put shades in a 15 part serialised story. I’m hoping it lives up to it.

That’s an advantage serial television has over a one-shot film. Alex is right about that. You have much greater commercial considerations in a film than you do in an extended TV series and you can do a lot more. Just like you can do a lot more in a novel: in a novel you have a lot more time and unlimited budget. You can do what you want.

We’ll see what they do, we’ll see where Discovery goes.

For your own original writing, what are you working on at the moment?

I have another Pip & Flinx, Commonwealth novel coming out from Del Rey in November called Strange Music. Next year there’ll be a standalone science fiction novel about the last human being in the galaxy, originally called Reliquary but they’ve changed the title now to Relic, coming out from Del Rey.

And we’re putting together a collection of short stories centred around a very strange mountain man in the old American West – there are 18 stories. His name is Mad Amos Malone and he’s considerably more than just a slightly stinky oversized mountain man: he’s been to the Sorbonne for example. It’s called The Complete Mad Amos Malone and it looks like Del Rey is going to do the ebook version of that and we’ll see who’s going to do the print version.

You’re keeping yourself busy!

I try to. And I’ve written a standalone Commonwealth novel called Secretions, science fiction which is based entirely on slime, so I know there’ll be a lot of 14 year old boys looking forward to that!

Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien: Covenant and Alien: Covenant: Origins are all available now from Titan Books

Thanks to Laurie & Lydia at Titan Books for their help with this interview