To celebrate the countdown to Splinters, book 1 of our upcoming series, The Prospero Chronicles, Matt and I are devoting this month to our favorite alien-related moments in fiction. On these lists, you'll find a lot of sources of inspiration for The Prospero Chronicles, some major, some minor, and some other alien moments simply too cool or classic to pass up.
(You can check out Matt’s list on his blog, and you might also enjoy my list of favorite zombie-related moments from last year).
Splinters will be available September 23rd (my 25th birthday!), and you can already pre order it...
But for now, in my number five spot, Ripley vs. the Alien queen.
To the few who don't know, this moment is from Aliens, the second movie in the Alien series. I'm not the first movie's biggest fan; I find it lacking in character development, momentum, pretty much everything except for a few iconic moments.
Aliens, on the other hand, I think really makes the most of the series' great creepy-classic premise. It goes with the standard bigger-is-better and do-more-of-what-worked-last-time sequel strategy, and in this particular case, it works beautifully.
In Aliens, a team is put together to investigate the disappearance of a mining colony where the aliens of the first movie were discovered. Ellen Ripley, the disgraced sole survivor of the first alien attack, is talked into coming along as the closest thing humanity has to an expert on the subject.
I won't spoil any of the human intrigue that ensues, but naturally, Ripley and her team end up stranded in the alien-infested remains of the colony, fighting for their lives and to rescue Newt, a surprisingly non-irritating, non-wandering-off child survivor of the aliens.
The big moment, Ripley's last-ditch effort to rescue Newt from the queen with the help of a mech suit previously rationalized as the future's version of a forklift, is so infamous and self-explanatory that I'm just going to embed the video.