version 4 - The Alien Encyclopedia

multiple Chestburster embryos via literally regurgitating them into the victim's mouth. We alreadyhave a problematic Xenomorph life cycle without AvP, with the dubious canon of the Alien beingable to transform victims into eggs as seen in the Director's Cut of the first Alien movie. The hybridwould further complicate things, demanding answers to questions like: “Why does the hybrid behavein this unique way? Is it exclusive to a Predator-based hybrid? Has it something to do withPredator reproduction? But wouldn't that contradict the reproduction method of the Xenomorph, forwhich we have no evidence to be influenced by species-specific reproduction methods?” Thiswould also force me to incorporate AvP and even Predator lore to a great, possibly complete extent,and I wanted to keep the focus of this encyclopedia solely on the Alien franchise. However, thereare still interesting tidbits featured in AvP media which I felt expanded on the Alien lore and therefore,included it, one example being S.E.T.I. still existing in 2229.The same goes for lore unique to alternate scripts (most of them written for Alien³) and early draftslike the Jon Spaihts script for Prometheus aka Alien: Engineers. For instance, I plan to include generalinformation about the Union of Progressive People, an element from the alternate Alien³ scriptby William Gibson. However, I omitted information from the plot involving the UPP that contradictAlien³ as we know it. As a side note irrelevant to this guideline, the UPP happened to be recently introducedinto the regular canon by the Nintendo DS game Aliens Infestation.c) The writing perspectiveThis encyclopedia is written from an in-universe perspective, meaning that entries are written as ifthey really happened or they really exist. Therefore, no entries regarding or references to themovies, comics, novels etc. themselves, their creation or the persons involved exist. Informationoriginating from behind-the-scenes material is incorporated in in-universe form.To see what I mean, compare the Wikipedia entry for “Xenomorph (Alien)”, more specifically thesection about the Newborn:In Alien Resurrection, due to significant genetic tampering in an attempt to recoverDNA from the deceased Ellen Ripley and the Alien Queen within her, the resultingcloned Aliens show a number of minor human traits. 1This quote references the real-life movie instead of solely the events that happened inside the Alienuniverse. The plot of the movie Alien Resurrection is present in this encyclopedia as its in-universecounterpart, the Auriga incident. Compared to Wikipedia taking a real-life approach, this encyclopediais like, for example, an encyclopedia about dinosaurs - creatures which really existed, a factwhich is reflected in its writing.I chose this approach for several reasons:• Reason 1: Precedents. Most prominent are the non-fiction works covering the Star Wars universe,which are often written in-universe. An example are the Essential Guides. It even hasan Aliens precedent in the form of the Colonial Marines Technical Manual. It seemed a logicalthing to do it for this encyclopedia, too.• Reason 2: To separate and define the purpose of this book. You won't find any entries aboutreal-life content related to the Alien franchise. This is not “The Making of the Alien universe”,as it is not supposed to be a making-of book. So, instead of making things blurry byincluding real-life perspectives in the context of an in-universe topic, things are clear-cuthere. A mixed approach may work for a Wikipedia entry, aimed to be a single, isolated documentabout a topic, to be complete (meaning covering both lore and behind-the-scenes as-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenomorph_%28Alien%29 (document version as of October 7, 2011)