New ALIEN movie starts shooting next week

A new Alien movie starts shooting next week, which is kind of surprising given how little fuss has been made about it.

The new Alien film is being produced by Ridley Scott, but it will actually be directed by Fede Alvarez (the reasonably well-received 2013 Evil Dead remake) from a script by his usual collaborator Rodo Sayagues. The two also worked on the 2016 horror movie Don't Breathe and last year's Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot.

The film stars Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim: Uprising, Mare of Easttown) and Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold), with David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu also on board.

Remarkably, we know almost nothing about the film, such as where it fits in the Alien timeline. The plot synopsis is decidedly vague:

"In this ninth entry in the immensely popular and enduring film series, a group of young people on a distant world find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe."

That does seemingly confirm the film has no crossover with Noah Hawley's incoming Alien TV show, which is set on Earth, possibly after the events of Prometheus but before Alien itself.

The synopsis is also interesting for listing eight prior Alien films: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Aliens vs. Predator (2004), Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (2007), Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). In its recent licensing and canon announcements, the two Aliens vs. Predator films were omitted from the Aliens canon (as suggested by Prometheus, which seemingly contradicts the events of the AvP movies) and Fox have indicated that regard the Aliens, Predator and AvP franchises as three distinct timelines and continuities.

The synopsis does sound a little disposable as a story concept, but it will be interesting to see what comes of it. The film is presumably targeting a 2024 release window.

SF model company Eaglemoss enters administration

British company Eaglemoss has entered administration, in a surprise move today that caught fans off-guard and left subscribers to the company's products wondering about their undelivered purchases.

My own Eaglemoss collection: the OG Galactica, Colonial One, the battlestar Pegasus, the USS Voyager, the USS Excelsior and an OG Cylon basestar

For the last decade Eaglemoss has been producing reasonably-priced, reasonable-quality spacecraft models from the Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Expanse, Aliens and Predator franchises, along with figurines and statues from franchises including Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, James Bond, The Walking Dead, Ghostbusters and the DC Universe, with a strong focus on Batman material. Particularly notable was their exhaustive approach to the franchises, creating models of vehicles and characters that have never been made before.

Eaglemoss had also branched into publishing, reprinting numerous classic Star Trek comics and a series of companion books to their model line, often bringing attention and focus to the original model-makers or CG artists.

Eaglemoss were founded in the 1970s and became a leading company in the "partwork" business, where a magazine and part of a model are released each month and, over the course of many months, the buyer ends up with the final model. The idea was popular because it meant people could effectively defer the cost of a model over months or even years rather than having to pay all in one lump sum. However, the model was criticised because often the total cost of the model far exceeded purchasing it in one go. Despite this, the model proved popular into the 1990s.

Eaglemoss pivoted to focusing on prebuilt lines of models in the early 2010s, mainly through their Hero Collector line of Star Trek ships. The line proved very popular, with surprisingly large numbers of people signing up to a subscription model where they received every new ship, ever month. The line extended to an XL line of super-sized ships. The line was hugely successful and saw Eaglemoss diversifying into other franchises. Their line of Doctor Who models and figures was also successful. However, the performance of other lines seemed dubious: their Battlestar Galactica line seemed to fizzle out after the most obvious, iconic ships had been produced and their latest line, based on The Expanse, seemed to have done poorly (some odd ship choices may not have helped, such as picking the obscure UN-One ship before the much more iconic Donnager). They had also faced rejections in trying to acquire rights to other franchises: another company picked up the licence for a similar range of Star Wars ships, whilst Warner Brothers rebuffed the company's efforts to acquire the Babylon 5 licence.

Eaglemoss seemed to be doing very well but, like so many other businesses, they were badly impacted by the COVID pandemic and resulting bottleneck in production and transport from China. They also faced sharply rising costs.

Administration is a system where companies, instead of immediately declaring bankruptcy, are able to go through a restructuring process to try to salvage the company as a going concern, overseen by financial experts and advisors. Although entering administration is never a good thing, many companies have returned to profitability and stability following the process. However, Eaglemoss have been forced to let people go, with their Doctor Who range head confirming via Twitter that had had been made redundant.

During administration a company can sell through existing product, but will usually not be able to acquire more. This has led to fan concerns over the company's few remaining partwork magazines. A Ghostbusters collection to build the ECTO-1 vehicle was only a few parts from conclusion, whilst a Star Trek collection to build the Next Generation version of the USS Enterprise wasn't even halfway done. Customers are trying to get refunds or face being left out of pocket and with incomplete models.

Noah Hawley confirms his ALIENS TV series will bring the xenomorph to Earth

Noah Hawley, the much-feted writer of Fargo and Legion, is working on an Aliens TV series for FX as his next project.

The writer had been working on a Star Trek movie for Paramount, but apparently Paramount shelved his idea because it had been revolving around new characters rather than established players. Shrugging, Hawley has swapped one classic SF universe for another, even finding time to pen a novel (Anthem, due in January 2022) inbetween.

He has confirmed that his Aliens project will bring the xenomorphs to Earth for the first time in the main series (they did appear on Earth in the non-canon, Aliens vs. Predator splinter timeline, and in comics and novels) and apparently the Weyland-Yutani Company is finally going to reap what it sows when the xenos run amok in their white collar heartland.

Hawley has confirmed that series regular Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) will not appear, saying he feels her story is complete, and the series will rely on brand new characters. He also confirmed that he wants to make a fifth and final season of Fargo that ties the whole series together and gives it a definitive conclusion, but that's a bit further off at the moment.

The Aliens TV series is currently planned to go into production in early 2022, probably to debut on screen in 2023.

Wertzone Classics: Aliens

Gateway Station, 2179. Rescued after spending fifty-seven years frozen in deep sleep, Ellen Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, is horrified when her reports of the lethal xenomorph that wiped out her crew are dismissed as mental delusions. She is even more horrified to learn that the planet where they found the alien is now home to a bustling colony. When all contact with the colony is lost, the Colonial Marines are called in to investigate with a huge amount of state-of-the-art firepower and Ripley is offered the chance to put the horror to rest...or unleash a new one.

Even in 1986, Alien was an acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction and horror cinema. The idea of creating a sequel to it felt like a risk, especially when the job fell to a relatively young Canadian film-maker with only a single proper movie to his name. Fortunately, the film-maker was James Cameron and the previous film on his CV was The Terminator, marking him as a promising director to watch.

Aliens more than fulfilled that promise. Arguably the strongest film in the franchise and much less-arguably one of the greatest action SF movies ever made, Aliens is that rare film which is near-flawlessly executed. The cast is fantastic, the writing is tight and the effects are impressive whilst informing and reinforcing the story and its themes of PTSD, cultural alienation, motherhood and family.

It's this attention to the film's psychological angle as well as the more superficial elements of action and explosions which makes it tick, and is something that Cameron exploits well in most of his films. Ripley was just one crewmember on the Nostromo, her late emergence as the main protagonist meaning we didn't get to know her very well. The sequel rectifies that in spades, revealing that she had a daughter (now deceased) and a home life which the xenomorph took away from her forever, as well as preventing her from ever getting a good's night's sleep again. Cameron also layers the film with a surprisingly robust layer of realism: Ripley for very obvious reasons doesn't want to go anywhere near the alien ever again, but just knowing that the ship and its thousands of eggs are still on LV-426 is enough to cause her to experience terror, justifying her decision to go back.

There is a robust intelligence to Aliens which is, quite simply, largely missing from most modern films and TV shows. The marines react fairly realistically to the situations they find themselves in, the characters react with logic to the tactical disadvantage they are in and the aliens' reluctance to attack the facility en masse is explained by their own limited numbers (there are only about a hundred aliens, as there were only a hundred colonists on the planet to be impregnated) and the steps taken to keep them in check, such as the sentry guns and the humans' weapons which can kill them with relative ease. Aliens delivers both a cathartic power fantasy - Ripley and her comrades blow away dozens of xenomorphs when just one wiped out her entire crew in the first film - but also a fragile one, as when the marines are picked off (mostly through logic than them acting like idiots) and the main characters suffer serious reversals. There is an integrity to Aliens' script and its respect for the intelligence of the audience that should be included in every basic scriptwriting class in Hollywood.

Which isn't to say that Aliens is all logic and themes. It brings a huge amount of action carnage to the table, with jaw-dropping set pieces following in at times dizzying succession. The marines trade quips and insults with lived-in believability. The cast, from Sigourney Weaver's multi-faceted Ripley to Bill Paxton's blustering Hudson to Michael Biehn's stoic Hicks and Lance Henriksen's earnest Bishop - is uniformly brilliant, from the bit-part marines who might as well be wearing red shirts up to the main stars. The production design, mixing Alien's industrial aesthetic with a sleeker, slightly more futuristic office chic, is impressive. James Horner's soundtrack starts off minimalist and restrained but later goes into speaker-straining bombast, but always in a way that reinforces the action. Even the film's sound effects are iconic, from the dread-inducing beeping of the motion trackers to the distinctive fire of the pulse rifles to the organic terror of an egg opening.

Trying to identify a weak point in Aliens (*****) is difficult. Arguably the Director's Cut addition of scenes set in the pre-carnage colony undercuts the later tension by showing the colonists finding the crashed ship, but seeing the fully-lit and inhabited colony in "normal" mode and Newt before she becomes a catatonic mess does add more pathos to events later on. Perhaps the idea that no human crewmembers would remain on the Sulaco when the operation starts is a little too convenient. These are really minor issues, though, and should not detract from the film's place in the canon of SF classics. Aliens is a masterpiece of both horror and SF action.

A note on edition: there are numerous editions of the Aliens movies available. Probably the best is the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray box set, which features both the original cinematic editions and extended versions of all four main-series Aliens movies, complete with tons of special features. This is available now in the UK and USA.

New ALIENS short movies released to celebrate franchise's 40th anniversary

The Aliens franchise is turning 40 this year and Fox (and new corporate overlords Disney) are celebrating that fact to the hilt, although it's fair to say that the last few movies in the franchise have not exactly set the world on fire.

In an interesting and commendable movie, Fox have allowed several film-makers to shoot some new, live-action short films set in the Aliens setting. The first two, Containment and Specimen, have already been released and four more are on the way.

They are surprisingly quite good, probably the best additions to the live-action Aliens mythos since at least Alien 3 was released in 1992. The short length suits the creeping horror of the franchise a lot better, and allows them to experiment with tone a bit.

With Fox having been gobbled up by Disney, it appears that plans to make further movies in the Prometheus/Covenant sub-series are on hold. It'll be interesting to see if there are plans to take the franchise somewhere fresher in the future, but these short films indicate that maybe there's life in the old facehugger yet.

RIP Al Matthews

Actor Al Matthews has passed away at the age of 76.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1942, Matthews served for six years in the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. He was promoted to sergeant and was given thirteen combat awards and decorations, including two purple hearts.

Matthews moved to the UK and worked for a time as a folk singer, even making a minor hit, "Fool", which hit the UK Top Twenty in 1975. He became BBC Radio 1's first black DJ in 1978. He also became interested in acting and started appearing in small screen roles in the late 1970s, including films such as The Omen III and Superman III, and TV series such as Grange Hill.

In 1986 Matthews landed his biggest and what remains his best-known role, when he was cast as Gunnery Sergeant Al Apone in James Cameron's Aliens. Matthews' charismatic performance, drawing on his own US military experience, became iconic and he landed several of the film's more iconic lines. Matthews also took up the role of an unofficial military advisor to Cameron and the rest of the film's cast, teaching them how to move, hold weapons and respond to orders in the field. Cameron regretted both killing off the character so early and not giving him more to do.

Although his character was killed off in the film, he reprised the role for the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines (2013). The character of Avery Johnson in the Halo franchise was created in homage to Matthews' performance as Apone.

He continued to act regularly until the late 1990s, appearing in movies such as Tomorrow Never Dies and The Fifth Element, before retiring to Spain. He passed away at a retirement home in Alicante.

Promo images confirm date setting of ALIEN: COVENANT

In May 2017, Ridley Scott will release Alien: Covenant. This is a sequel of sorts to his 2012 movie Prometheus and will serve as a semi-prequel to the original Alien, apparently bridging the way between the bizarre creatures seen in Prometheus and the more familiar xenomorphs.

For the last few days 20th Century Fox have been unveiling promotional imagery for the new movie, accompanied by times and dates. These confirm that Alien: Covenant takes place (at least) between 7 and 8 December 2104. Prometheus took place in the final week of 2093, concluding on New Year's Day 2094. The original Alien began on 3 June 2122, with Aliens taking place 57 years later in 2179. So, if nothing else, it's good to see that someone is paying attention to the chronology of the series.

 

Alien: Covenant will be released on 19 May.

Teaser poster and release date for ALIEN: COVENANT unveiled

20th Century Fox has released a teaser poster for Alien: Covenant, as well as confirming a new release date. The new movie, which will bridge Prometheus with the original Alien, will be released on 19 May.

Ridley Scott has directed the new film, which started life as a direct sequel to Prometheus before metamorphosing in development into a "proper" Aliens movie.

Michael Fassbender reprises his role as android David, with Noomi Rapace returning as Elizabeth Shaw. Guy Pearce is also expected to reappear as Peter Weyland (presumably in flashbacks or recordings). New actors include Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup and Danny McBride.

The new movie will involve a human colony ship arriving on a planet where the only inhabitant is the android David, from Prometheus. According to some reports, the planet may be the homeworld of the Engineers and will involve both the traditional xenomorph and a new type of alien creature, the neomorph, which may be what results when a facehugger impregnates an Engineer.

The Cats of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Many years ago, the great and incomparable Terry Pratchett uttered a truthism: 

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realise what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."

He also said:

"In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."

It does explain a lot.

Cats have been human companions for almost ten thousand years, and only dogs have been human companions for longer. This is probably why science fiction and fantasy authors tend to assume that in the future there will still be cats around, and even fantasy worlds with a ton of non-human races will also have cats showing up. Anthropomorphised cats - usually alien and fantasy races based on cats, but sometimes magically-transformed actual cats - are also commonly found in the genre. So I thought it'd be interesting to put together a greatest hits collection of cats in science fiction and fantasy (and yes, we do dogs as well).

Greebo, the lord and master of all feline activity in the Kingdom of Lancre.

The greatest - and certainly smelliest - cat in the history of genre fiction is Greebo, the cat/familiar of Nanny Ogg, one of the witches of Lancre. Greebo is old, scarred from a thousand battles and incapable of backing down from anything. Greebo is an unrepentant sex pest of a cat, having fathered definitely hundreds and potentially thousands of kittens across the kingdom. Possessed of an uncanny intelligence and the combat nous of a barbarian warlord, Greebo is noted for having killed at least two vampires in battle, near-mortally wounded an elf warrior, surprised a she-bear and chased a wolf up a tree. In fact Greebo has only lost an engagement once, when he chased a vixen into her den where her cubs were located. However, it is hinted that Greebo's mastery of battle is a result of him knowing when to fight and when not to: when confronted by Legba, the black cockerel of the voodoo witch Mrs. Gogol, he immediately backed down.

Greebo will not suffer to be touched by anyone other than Nanny Ogg, who, despite her normally formidable powers of observation and good judgement of character, remains convinced that he is a fluffy and friendly kitten rather than a furball of nightmares who is still wanted for crimes committed across the Disc, incurred when the witches travelled across the continent to Genua and then back again. In Genua Greebo was briefly transformed into human form. In this form he was six feet tall, well-muscled, with a mane of black hair and clad in form-fitting leather, along with an eyepatch over his bad eye. He exuded a kind of "greasy, diabolic sexuality". Fortunately he was returned to cat form before tremendous damage was wreaked on the population of Genua.

Greebo once furthered the cause of quantum science when, through experimentation, confirmed that a cat, upon being left in a box for an extended period of time, could in fact exist in one of three potential states: Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. Upon the box being opened, the quantum waveform collapsed into one outcome, to whit, Greebo bit the face off the elf opening the box.

Greebo, of course, is the true star of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels and plays a substantial role in Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, Carpe Jugulum and Wintersmith.

 

Having lived for circa 60 years, Jones might be the longest-lived cat in history in the Alien continuity.

Jones, the rat-catcher of the deep space mining vessel Nostromo, is a survivor. In fact, in the current Alien canon, he's sole crewmember of the Nostromo not to get killed by the xenomorph (it even got Ripley in the end). He also has the sense to stay at home in Aliens when Ripley zooms off to engage the xenomorphs on LV-426. Neill Blomkmap's off-on again Alien 5 will apparently eject both Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from continuity but I suspect Jones will have long since moved on to the furry cat home in the sky.

Even Frankenstein knew that his slobby owner's plan to retire to Fiji to raise sheep and horses was moronic.

Frankenstein is a small black cat born on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Dave Lister, the lowest-ranking crewperson on the mining ship Red Dwarf, buys her to alleviate boredom. Horrified at the discovery there is an unquarantined animal on board, Captain Hollister orders Lister to turn over the cat so it can be cut up and dissected. When he refuses to promise to put the cat back together again afterwards, Lister refuses and is put in temporal stasis for the rest of the trip, forfeiting eighteen months pay (in the novel continuity Lister does this deliberately so he can get back to Earth faster). Unfortunately, a lethal radiation leak wipes out the crew and forces the ship's AI, Holly, to take the vessel into deep space until the radiation danger has passed...which takes three million years. When Lister wakes up, he finds himself quite possibly the last surviving human being in the entire universe. The only other living humanoid on board is a bipedal descendant of Frankenstein's kittens, known simply as "Cat", a vain and preening creature who can't maintain his concentration on anything other than sleeping or eating for more than five minutes.

Cats have played a key role in many SFF stories, but for Red Dwarf  (which returns for its eleventh season next month) they basically provide the very rationale for the show's existence and underpin its premise, which is pretty good going.

Kittenbus, the younger - and somewhat less nightmare-inducing - form of a Catbus.

The Catbus is an outrageously cute/despair-inducingly disturbing (delete as appropriate) form of conveyance from the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbour Totoro and its short spin-off, Mei and the Kittenbus. It's a giant cat with many legs which has been hollowed out (urgh) and turned into a vehicle, with its eyes serving as giant headlights and a permanent, rictus-like grin jammed onto its face and unleashing a haunting "miaow" in lieu of beeping a horn. It reminds me a bit of that stuffed dead cat that got turned into a drone. Younger catbuses (catbusi?) are known as kittenbuses, but are only big enough for a single child passenger.

Slag, the ship's cat of the airship Ketty Jay, as realised by Anjakes on DeviantArt.

If there was one thing missing from Firefly, as I'm sure everyone knows, it was a cat. That kind of low-down cargo ship was crying out for a ship's cat to get all up in everyone's business. However, Joss Whedon was probably enough of an old hand at Hollywood to know that trying to get a cat to act on-screen is an exercise in futility. Books, of course, have no such limitations and Chris Wooding's excellent saga The Tales of the Ketty Jay (which is basically a steampunk Firefly in a totally non-derivative and equally-awesome kind of way) features a feline crewmember of the good airship. Slag is an old cat, fond of catching rats and loyal (in a relaxed kind of way) to his crewmen. Part of the genius of the books is that we regularly get chapters told from Slag's perspective and the cat actually gets his own character arc throughout all four books. Slag is an ever-present character in the series very few of the other cats in this list are, which an impressive and surprisngly non-mawkish achievement.

The cover designer clearly went to town on this one.

Pixel is a timeline-hopping cat who appears in the novels The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein. The cat has the inexplicable ability to pass through solid matter, apparently a result of its "inability to know any better". At one point the cat gains the ability to talk.

Sir Pounce-a-Lot and Anders (before going psycho), by Morteraphan on DeviantArt.

Ser Pounce-a-Lot is a cat who appears in the Dragon Age video games from BioWare. He debuts in Awakenings, the expansion to the original Dragon Age: Origins, as a small kitten. The Warden (the player-character) can give the kitten to his follower Anders as a gift. Anders raises the kitten to adulthood, occasionally producing it to talk to during idle moments. The cat can be deployed in battle as a means of healing the party mid-combat, although how logically this is achieved is never explained.

In Dragon Age II a rather grumpy Anders will confirm that he had to relinquish the cat at the behest of his fellow Grey Wardens after finding it distracted him. It is possible that this lack of feline affection contributed to his brutally ruthless decision to declare war on the templars at the end of the game. To the annoyance of fans, Sir Pounce-a-Lot likewise failed to reappear in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Some fans theorise that Dragon Age IV may feature Anders and Sir Pounce reunited as a battle-hardened adventuring duo stalking the wilds of Thedas.

Spot was a particularly resilient and hardy space-travelling cat who served with distinction on two of the Federation starships to bear the name Enterprise.

Spot is an interstellar feline and crewmember of the Galaxy-class starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D). Spot is adopted by android crewmember Lt. Commander Data as part of his ongoing attempts to understand humanity. Data's attempts to train Spot backfired when he inadvertently discovered the cat had instead trained him to feed and pet her upon command. Spot was noted for her calmness under pressure, at one point being transformed into an iguana with no after-effects. At one point Spot gave birth to a litter of kittens. Spot was noted for her intolerance of people she didn't like, unprovokedly attacking both Riker and La Forge. Apart from Data, she was only affectionate towards Lt. Reginald Barclay. She and Worf developed a mutual dislike for one another, but following Data's destruction in the battle with Shinzon Worf reluctantly agreed to adopt the animal. Later he cited the then-aged cat as having a "true warrior's spirit" hidden behind a facade of lazy indolence.

Spot appeared regularly in Seasons 4-7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as the movies Generations and Nemesis.

Data once wrote a poem about the cat, Ode to Spot, which follows in its entirety:

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

 Spot's reaction to the poem is not known.

The Cat That Launched A Thousand Memes.

Lying Cat (a recurring character in comic book series Saga) is a very large feline and constant companion to the bounty hunter known as the Will. Lying Cat shares most common feline traits, but her size makes her formidable in combat. Lying Cat's most distinguishing feature is the ability to tell when someone is lying. Upon detecting deceit, the cat will simply growl, "Lying". This includes even when people are lying to themselves about some kind of emotional distress. One drawback to this power is that the cat will say it even if the person lying is her owner/partner, the Will.

Mrs. Norris and her master, a rare example of cat-and-human team villainy in SFF.

Mrs. Norris is the pet cat of Argus Filch, the caretaker of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The cat is grumpy and ill-tempered, like its owner, and possesses a strong bond with him, apparently able to alert him to any misbehaving children in the school grounds. The cat was briefly petrified by the Serpent of Slytherin, but later made a full recovery (although some claim her mood was worsened by this incident).

Mrs. Norris is, unusually for SFF, an antagonistic cat. She appears in the Harry Potter novels and movies. Some fans theorised that Mrs. Norris had some kind of magical bond with Filch but J.K. Rowling confirmed she is merely a normal - if nasty - feline.

Balerion, a cat with all the attitude, self-confidence and unreasoning love of violence of Gregor Clegane.

Balerion the Black Dread was the greatest dragon in the history of Westeros, a terrifying monster that helped its rider, King Aegon Targaryen, conquer an entire continent.

Three hundred years later, its namesake prowled the halls of the Red Keep in King's Landing. Originally a sweet kitten owned by Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, the cat seems to have not borne the death of his mistress (brutally killed during the Sack of King's Landing) very well. It had a torn ear (some fans theorise sustained during the Sack) and a disposition that was less "mean" and closer to "psychotically vicious". Perfectly willing to attack and kill even the largest crows and ravens in the rookery (to the despair of Grand Maester Pycelle), the cat is a legend in the Red Keep. He once stole into the dinner hall and snatched a quail out of the hand of Lord Tywin Lannister, a feat which earned the cat the respect of Robert Baratheon. The cat later evaded capture at the hands of Arya Stark (whilst being trained in water-dancing by Syrio Forel) and bullied the kittens belonging to Tommen Baratheon before being run off. At about twenty years old, the cat's belligerence shows no sign of abating.

Balerion, of course, is one of the more memorable animal characters of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. Although Rhaenys's kitten and the black monster of the novels are not 100% confirmed to be the same cat, various official artwork and George R.R. Martin's comments suggest they are.

Haviland Tuf, a man who distrusts humanity and prefers the company of felines.

Dax is the genetically-enhanced master feline of the interstellar seedship Ark. Created by Haviland Tuf, the cat is notably larger than most felines and has formidable psi powers, capable of detecting subterfuge and deception and alerting his owner to any risks present. Dax is the largest and most capable of a number of cats living on the Ark, most of whom defer to his superiority.

Dax is another feline of George R.R. Martin's creation, being a notable character in his 1986 SF novel Tuf Voyaging.

There are, of course, too many cats in SFF to count in one article. Other notable examples include:

• Mogget, from the Sabriel novels.
• Isis, Gary Seven's shapeshifting cat from the classic Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth!
• The Amazing Maurice from Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
• Rowl, from Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass.
• Mister, from The Dresden Files.
• Tailchaser from the classic Tad Williams novel Tailchaser's Song.
• Spangle, from Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward.
• Lady May, from Cordwainer Smith's Game of Rat and Dragon.
• Bast from Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
• Sir Pounce, also from A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.
• Mr. Bigglesworth, Dr. Evil's evil cat, from the Austin Powers movies.
• Baudelaire from Phantom 2040.
• Petronius Arbiter, also from the works of Robert Heinlein.
• Zap the Cat from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.
• Orion from Men in Black.
• Lylan from Lloyd Alexander's Castle of Llyr.
• The cigarette-smoking mutant cat of Transmetropolitan.
• Musty, the cat of the witch Rhea of Coos, in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.
• In a similar vein, Churchill from Pet Semetary.
• And the cats of Earth when they appear in the Dreaming, in Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

Cat-inspired races are also common in the genre. Notable examples include: the Kzinti of Larry Niven's Known Space novels, the (almost certainly Kzinti-inspired) Kilrathi of the Wing Commander video games, the Caitians of Star Trek (most notably regular crewmember Lt. M'Ress in Star Trek: The Animated Series) and the Khajit of The Elder Scrolls ("Khajit has wares if you have coin").

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PROMETHEUS II greenlit for 2017 release

Ridley Scott will start shooting the sequel to the 2012 SF movie Prometheus in January 2016, likely with a view to releasing the film in 2017.

The news came as a slight surprise. Scott had seemingly pushed the sequel onto the backburner in favour of other projects, such as the long-gestating Blade Runner II. The muted critical response to the original movie and its middling financial success were believed to have been disappointing to 20th Century Fox as well. More notably, the studio has also been developing an Alien 5 with director Neil Blomkamp, with Sigourney Weaver set to return as Ripley and Michael Biehn as Hicks in a movie that seemingly ignores the third and fourth films. There had been theories that Alien 5's existence made a sequel to Prometheus less likely.

However, the sequel is now being fast-tracked. Michael Green and Jack Paglen have written the script (Damon Lindelof is not involved this time around) and Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender have already committed to reprising their roles as Shaw and David. The movie will presumably pick up on their adventures having seized an Engineer starship and taken off to find their homeworld at the end of the first movie. According to Scott, the traditional xenomorph alien will not appear in this film, despite hints to its origins in the previous one.

RIP James Horner

One of the greats of the film composing world, James Horner, passed away on Monday. He started composing for film in 1978 with The Lady in Red and was still active at the time of his death. He is best-known for composing the soundtracks for the two highest-grossing movies of all time, Avatar and Titanic.

Horner was an concert hall composer before moving into films. His first soundtrack of genre interest was Battle Beyond the Stars in 1981, but he hit the big time when he was picked to score Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan the following year. His score was highly praised for the way it backed both the action and character moments perfectly. He also scored Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

This moved Horner into the big leagues and he scored many of the most well-known movies of the 1980s and 1990s, including 48 Hours, Krull, Cocoon (and its sequel), Commando, An American Tail, *batteries not included, Willow, Red Heat, The Land Before Time, Field of Dreams, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Glory, The Rocketeer, Patriot Games, The Pelican Brief, Clear and Present Danger, Legends of the Fall, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Jumanji, Deep Impact, The Mask of Zorro and The Bicentennial Man.

In 1986 Horner began a highly fruitful collaboration with the director James Cameron. He produced the acclaimed soundtrack to Aliens before working with the director on Titanic. Horner won his only two Academy Awards for the film, both for the score and for the song "My Heart Will Go On" (sung by Celine Dion). In 2009 they reunited so Horner could produce the score for Avatar. Both Cameron and Horner had indicated that Horner would return to score the Avatar sequel trilogy, but it's unknown if Horner had already begun working on that project at the time of his passing.

James Horner was acclaimed as one of the "Three Js" of film scoring in the latter part of the 20th Century, alongside the late Jerry Goldsmith and the still-going-strong John Williams. He soundtracked many of favourite movies of all time and he will be missed.

New ALIEN film confirmed

20th Century Fox have commissioned director Neill Blomkamp to work on a new Alien film. The director of District 9, Elysium and Chappie had hinted he was working on ideas for a new film in the franchise a few months ago.

The new project is proceeding simultaneously alongside Ridley Scott's Prometheus II. Scott had previously suggested that the sequel to Prometheus would move away from even the vague connections to the xenomorphs the original film had in favour of the mythology and backstory of the Engineers. Whilst Fox is okay with this - Prometheus grossed almost half a billion dollars at the box office - they also seem to want to continue the core Alien franchise at the same time.

Little is known about the new film, although in Blomkamp's concept art it appears he was considering a 'proper' Alien 5 with Sigourney Weaver and possibly even Michael Biehn reappearing in their roles as Ripley and Hicks. The fact that Hicks died (controversially off-screen) in Alien 3 has hinted that Biehn might be following Scott's idea that none of the films after Aliens should be considered canon. I can't see Fox entirely being happy with that (it would remove no less than four films from the canon) unless they thought it would make them a ton of cash.

If work is only starting now, it's unlikely we will see Alien 5 before late 2017 or early 2018 at the earliest. This would make for easily the longest gap in the main series since the franchise started in 1979. It remains to be seen if Blomkamp can breathe some new life into this increasingly tired foe.

Filling the blanks: tying PROMETHEUS to ALIEN

Ridley Scott's new movie Prometheus has won a fair amount of critical acclaim (though a more mixed general reception) and an impressive opening week's worth of money, but it's also left a lot of people pondering over the precise relationship between the movie and Alien, to which it acts as a sort-of prequel. Through careful research (i.e. googling interviews) the following clarifications can be made:

NOTE: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR PROMETHEUS, ALIEN AND ALIENS.

An Engineer ship crash-landing on the surface of LV-223 in 2093.

Time and Date
Prometheus opens in 2089 with the discovery of a cave painting in Scotland which points the way to the Engineer base. The ship arrives at this location in the final week of 2093, with the final moments of the film taking place on New Year's Day, 2094.

No date is given in Alien for the action, save that it happens in the 22nd Century (due to the presence of a crew uniform patch that says, 'Flag of the United Americas 2104 to present'). In Aliens Carter Burke orders the colonists to investigate the crashed Engineer ship on 12 June '79. Assuming Aliens happens in 2179, then Alien takes place 57 years earlier, in 2122 (and this was later confirmed in featurettes in the Alien Legacy boxed set). From a computer display at the start of Alien, the movie starts on 3 June.

Thus, Prometheus concludes 28 years, 5 months and 2 days before the start of Alien.

The planet LV-426 orbits, along with several of its moons, in 2122.

Location
The planetary body that Prometheus flies to is called LV-223. The planetoid that the Nostromo crew land on in Alien (and is later colonised by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation prior to the events of Aliens) is called LV-426, informally known as 'Acheron'. The different designations seemingly confirm that these are different planetoids.

Both planetoids are depicted as moons circling larger gas giants. LV-426 is one of at least four moons orbiting a red-hued gas giant. LV-223 is one of two moons orbiting a blue-coloured gas giant. Given that we physically see four moons in Alien (three moons and the gas giant are seen in LV-426's sky) and a comprehensive 3D starmap in Prometheus only shows two, the conclusion is that these are different gas giants (otherwise the gas giant changes colour and acquires two additional moons in thirty years, which seems implausible).

In Alien, LV-426 is identified as being located in the Zeta II Reticuli star system. Zeta Reticuli is a real star system located 39.16 light-years from Earth in the constellation Reticulum, consisting of two stars in a binary orbit. However, the two stars are extremely far apart (dozens of times the distance between the Sun and Pluto), meaning that each star could hold an extensive solar system of its own without gravitationally interfering with the other.

LV-223, along with its mother planet and another moon, as shown on the Prometheus's scanners in 2093.

In Prometheus, the destination star system is not identified. A distance of 327,000,000,000,000 km is given, which translates as 34.56 light-years. Given that Zeta Reticuli's distance has been estimated with a strong degree of accuracy (the error margin is only 0.1 light-years), this would seem to confirm that LV-422 is not only a different planetoid to the one in Alien and Aliens, but is located in a totally different star system altogether. Some fans have postulated that LV-422 is located at Gliese 86, a star just under 35 light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus. This is especially popular as an extrasolar gas giant was discovered circling Gliese 86 in 2000. Gliese 86 and Zeta Reticuli are located in the same general neighbourhood, only being separated from one another by 10 light-years.

This splendid theorising has been torpedoed by Ridley Scott saying straight-out that Prometheus takes place in the Zeta Reticuli II star system as well, however.

Thus, the two planetoids in Prometheus and Alien - LV-223 and LV-426 - are different planetoids but they are located in the same star system. Based on the evidence above, I'd still suggest they are orbiting different gas giants.

The USS Sulaco approaching LV-426 in 2179.

Engineer bases and ships
According to Prometheus, the Engineers built an extensive military installation on LV-223 more than two thousand years ago. This installation consists of approximately five large domed buildings, each huge in size. At least two of the buildings had large, horseshoe-shaped spacecraft located adjacent to them. The installation appeared to be a base for the creation of a biological weapon of mass destruction, apparently for use against Earth. This facility was overrun and its population almost completely wiped out by unknown forces (but likely a bioweapon they lost control of) approximately 2,000 years before the events of Alien.

In Alien and Aliens, an Engineer starship of similar design to those seen in Prometheus is found on the surface of LV-426. Initial assumptions were that it had crashed, but more recent interviews (at the 18-minute mark) have suggested it landed or was parked deliberately there. According to Ridley Scott, this ship originated at the LV-223 facility and was on its way somewhere else (presumably not Earth) with its cargo of facehuggers when its cargo got out of control. The pilot landed on LV-426 and was killed, within a couple of hundred years of the destruction of the LV-223 facility (so between 1,800 and 2,200 years before the events of Alien). The fact that the facehugger eggs could survive and remain viable for that time period is impressive.

A mural in the Engineer base on LV-223, suggesting that the xenomorphs were extant more than 2,000 years ago.

The bioweapons and the xenomorph
On LV-223 a black liquid stored in vase-like containers serves as a destructive bioweapon. It can animate corpses, turning them into monstrous killers, and transform little worms into large, snake-like monsters. Rather more bizarrely, it can convert human sperm into a parasite-like creature that, when given a female human body to gestate in, transforms into a squid-like creature which can grow to colossal (some might indeed say, totally fricking preposterous) size and then impregnate another type of creature into another host, a creature which more closely resembles the traditional xenomorphs.

On LV-426, the cargo of the crashed Engineer ship consisted of eggs which, when hatched, produced parasitic 'facehuggers'. These creatures would attach themselves to a human or animal host and place an embryo in their chest. After a period of gestation (typically several hours, or several days for a queen creature capable of laying further eggs en masse) this 'chestburster' erupts through the host's ribcage and grows to large size within a matter of hours. This creature is the traditional xenomorph. Unlike the black goo things on LV-223, the xenomorph's life cycle appears fairly stable and predictable.

Note that, based on both the information provided by Scott in interviews and the mural in the LV-223 facility depicting the traditional xenomorph, the traditional xeno appears to have already been in existence for some time when the base on LV-223 was wiped out. This would then seem to contradict the popular (and perhaps obvious) theory that the black goo stuff in Prometheus is some type of prototype that would lead to the familiar xeno in future films (though the appearance of a proto-xeno in the final seconds of Prometheus would seem to suggest that this was the direction things were heading in).

Based on all of this I would argue that the standard xenomorph was already in existence and the Prometheus bioweapon was an attempt to replicate it. Given the inefficency of the Prometheus creatures, with a confusing and bizarre life-cycle, it can be concluded that the Prometheus bioweapon was a miserable failure. Perhaps all of their 'normal' xenomorph eggs had been put on the LV-426 ship and they were forced to develop a secondary weapon when their main one was put beyond their reach (which seems extremely unlikely, but there doesn't seem to be too many other conclusions that can be reached)?


Conclusion (speculation)
The Engineers are an intelligent alien race who may have had a hand in the appearance of life on Earth. If not, they certainly visited our stone age ancestors around 35,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago a group of Engineers, possibly military in origin, established a base on LV-223, a moon in the Zeta II Reticuli system, 39 light-years from Earth. They created a bioweapon, apparently taking inspiration from an already-existing alien lifeform known as the xenomorph. They apparently decided to wipe out life on Earth for reasons unknown (possibly ranging from fear that their creations were getting out of control to one of their emissaries being nailed to a cross - this latter idea is extremely idiotic, so hopefully that's not the direction they are going in).

A ship took of from the LV-223 base carrying a cargo hold full of xenomorph eggs. The pilot ended up getting infected. He made an emergency landing on LV-426, a moon circling a neighbouring gas giant in the same system, but was killed. He activated a warning beacon telling his fellows to stay away. They respected that and did not go after him. Instead, they decided to use their own bioweapon (perhaps thinking they could control it better than the xenos themselves, or perhaps they had put all of their xeno eggs on the ship and lost them in the crash) against Earth, but it got out of control and wiped out most of the facility. The last surviving Engineer managed to seal himself in stasis in a ship away from the threat of the bioweapon but ended up oversleeping by 2,000 years, until he was awoken by the crew of the Prometheus and was then infected by the bioweapon and killed.

There are still plot holes you can drive a power loader through in this scenario, but this does seem to be a fairly likely chain of events given the information we have so far.