After Aliens (1986) and Alien 3 (1992), there is a big old gap before the next film (1997’s Alien: Resurrection) takes place. It’s an area rife with possibilities for storytelling, akin to the gap between the events of A New Hope (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in Star Wars Continuity. Author T. R. Napper sets himself the mission of trying to fill in the blanks regarding the fate of one of the most beloved characters from Cameron’s flick (not Ripley, not Newt, not Hicks, not Hudson, not Vasquez) by taking a look at what happened after synthetic designer extraordinaire Michael Bishop took possession of the battered, broken, and burned remains of the Bishop android that accompanied Ripley and the Colonial Marines to LV426 and encountered one of the most beautiful, elegant, and dangerous species of alien ever encountered.
Bishop wakes up on an unknown spacecraft, in a new body, with many of his memories inaccessible. His munificent creator has given him a new shot at existence. He can study with Michael, research the medical and life changing possibilities, and mine data for future endeavors. Some of these will revolve around that most interesting new species, of course. However, all of the Bishop android’s files and memories about events on planets LV-426 and Fioria-161. He would like the information, Bishop is interested in keeping it secure from possible misuse, and the two share an opportunity to build a bridge of trust. However, the eerie twin synthetics known as Orthus (two bodies, one mind) seem to be omnipresent as well, bodyguards and slavish devotees of Michael’s wisdom.
Is there something sinister going on here?
But this is not only Bishop’s story. There are also three other major threads at play.
Karri Lee is an Australian ex-pat with family on one of the refugee camps that she would do anything to protect. So, she has signed up with the Colonial Marines, found herself connected to an established crew with the mission of boarding Michael Bishop’s lost spacecraft and finding out what happened to him. He went missing, and he’s needed. Her path will lead her down dark avenues both on a personal level (she must face cracking under pressure, the flight reflex, and the reality of Colonial Marine mortality levels) as well as an external one (including run ins with Weyland-Yutani machinations, the troops from enemy nations, as well as the mysterious, deadly Xenomorphs themselves). Can she blossom under pressure, or will she find herself stepped on.
Xuan Nguyen is a young Vietnamese woman, part of a family of smugglers who find themselves intercepted by an unsympathetic Chinese warship. Given trumped up charges of biological contamination and forced into an unlawful quarantine, the crew find themselves guinea pigs in that saber rattling nation’s experiments with Xenomorphs. She is the only member of her crew to escape the death spiders that grow within hideous eggs in that quarantine area, but a much more hideous terror awaits …
Su Wong is second in command of the Chinese warship Xinjian, and she is not comfortable with the direction her commander has taken them. She is not comfortable with the experiments, and she knows it is only a matter of time before an error will unleash the black demons upon the ship. But what can she possibly do to contain matters? And when the Vietnamese civilians are put in harm’s way, can she stand by and watch as her Party commands, or will she instead side with these innocents?
T. R. Napper is an author that has recently sprung upon the world’s science fiction stage with neo-cyberpunk works like 36 Streets and Neon Leviathan. With Aliens: Bishop, he takes a crack at spinning a yarn tied into a film franchise that has spawned some terrific reads (John Shirley’s Steel Egg is a standout), some terrible ones (no need to name names), some readable fluff (I rather enjoyed Mira Grant’s entry that melds YA romance with sf survival horror), and some gritty exercises. Napper tends toward the grittier side, particularly in the body counts that arise from the action sequences he puts his characters through. His style has a good, cinematic quality for such fare, giving us scenes of real horror and heroism, frantic and frenetic.
Unfortunately, folks coming to the book with experience in American military conventions will encounter a few oversights and assumptions that don’t quite meet up with reality. The interplay between the marines, the way they sometimes call one another soldier (which is a term usually used by people serving in the Army), and other minor details can throw a reader sensitive to such stuff right out of the story. As science fiction, there is a lot to recommend. As military science fiction, it is enthusiastic about its subject but not necessarily well versed in the minutiae regular readers of Baen Books authors David Drake or John Ringo might crave.
Still, Napper’s affection for the source material is pretty clear.
Where Aliens: Bishop really shines is in the philosophical approaches it takes to AI, to concepts of how a machine can learn to be human, of how memory plays a role in shaping creativity, and other big ideas. Much of this comes through the interplay between Bishop, his creator, and his synthetic siblings.
Consider this exchange between Bishop and his creator when one of the avenues of research has come up. It involves a kind of ghost in the machine uploading of one’s self into a quantum computer:
“After the incident at Hadley’s Hope,” Bishop said, “then again at Fiorina One-Six-One, my physical form was a limitation. If I were a disembodied consciousness—spread throughout a system, rather than bound to a single body—I could have done so much more to help my friends. I could have controlled a range of automated equipment, I could have sealed doors, sent warnings, generate distractions. I would not have needed to be in cryonic sleep, to preserve my physical form from wear and tear.
“I could have been everywhere, all at once,” he continued, “whenever I was needed, but instead I was confined to my body, so damaged that I could not sync with anything, and so by my limitations, my friends were killed. The hardy survivors of Hadley’s Hope dying also, in a cruel and unnecessary way.”
Michael listened, eyes narrowed.
“So I imagined uploading,” Bishop continued, “and concluded it would be a relatively straightforward process with an artificial human, because our memories are ordered and perfect. As long as the uploaded system can replicate my brain functioning, it should work. But then when I extended this analysis to my human friends and the marines in my unit, I realized it was so much more complex, for them.
“Human memory is disordered and imperfect and susceptible to revision, sometimes even falsification. Humans constantly remember events imperfectly, forget many of the mundane details of a typical day, and forget even important episodic events of their past, as the years and decades progress, and yet the paradox of human memory is that it is so much more vivid and dynamic than mine. It changes and evolves. A memory is different every time it is recalled, is it not, Michael?”
“Precisely,” his creator answered. “Precisely. Here is my conundrum. The quantum computer here can perfectly simulate my brain, in this moment only. The key is to simulate memory through time. So the experiment I have been conducting is layered. Firstly, the machine asks me to recall certain events: birthdays, loved ones, my school, my siblings, my work, my journeys. Everything. I have given the machine a tour through the closest and most guarded moments of my mind.
“The neural pathways fire when I recall these events,” he added, “and the machine marks where those pathways are. And then, a week or a month later, I will remember the same events, and the machine will mark the subtle changes in those pathways, and therefore my recollection. It will then begin to understand the way memories interact. The way they accrete and evolve over days and weeks. The machine will, eventually, learn how to replicate the vividness and imperfect beauty of human memory.”
Michael leaned forward, putting his elbows against the table, and arching his hands together.
“The machine is learning, Bishop. Progress at the start was slow, but now it moves faster and faster, and understands more and more fully. Soon I will upload more than just my mind, Bishop. Soon I will be able to upload my soul.”
Michael’s face was flushed, and even Bishop could recognize the expression. It had a certain radiance, in the same way a devout believer of religion had a certain radiance as they talked of the passion for their god. It was a type of fundamentalism, he might call it, although Bishop was not sure which god it was that Michael worshipped. The god of science. The god of the machine.
Or the god Michael Bishop.
Bishop looked away, at the quantum computer. No. These thoughts were improper and unbecoming. Michael would never be so self-serving. He had saved Bishop, after all, then liberated him from his programming. There had to be another explanation. Aliens: Bishop (pp. 181-183)
The flow of information, the exchange of ideas, and the way those ideas are expressed are all clues about character. Bishop is curious, somewhat innocent. Michael is older, experienced, suspicious. What’s best of all is that these are lines written with an ear for the kinds of stuff actor Lance Henricksen (who played both the Bishop android as well as Michael Bishop in the films) could and did deliver. That’s a necessary trick because once readers have an actor association with a character, there will always be an internal checker that says, “This sounds right,” or “This sounds so wrong,” which either keeps us in or kicks us out of the story.
There are also some rather cheeky nods to literature both in and out of the science fiction universe. My personal favorite is a nod to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (and its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now) when Michael Bishop describes the Xenomorphs thusly:
Michael breathed deeply through his nose, closing his eyes momentarily. “Horror has a face in this universe, and you must make an ally of horror,” he said. “For if you do not it will become an enemy to be feared. The Xenomorph embodies horror and moral terror, and therefore I will make the Xenomorph my friend. I will bend it to my will.” Aliens: Bishop (317)
I love a good allusion, and this certainly fits the bill. Readers don’t need to know the source material to get the gist and what it is trying to convey, but an awareness of the source material for that brings a great big smile. Kind of like knowing the “What is best in life?” bit from Conan: The Barbarian (1982) actually comes from Genghis Khan.
Aliens: Bishop is a quick read, enjoyable, but not one for folks who don’t want some intriguing science to go with their fiction. Sure, there are xenomorphs and gunfights, interstellar travel, cold wars heating up, and monsters lurking in the dark, but Napper’s entry in the Aliens universe has more than a few things on its mind, which it is eager to share. I now need to hunt up more of Napper’s works.
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Aliens: Bishop is available in paperback, hardcover, eBook, and audiobook editions.
“I Prefer the Term “Artificial Person,” Myself: T. R. Napper’s Aliens: Bishop” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Titan Books eBook edition, released in 2023.
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