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SYFY WIRE Alien

Climb aboard and inspect our sneak peek of Titan Books' new Alien: The Blueprints

By Jeff Spry
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Part of the extreme allure of the Alien franchise is its lived-in wealth of interesting interstellar spacecraft inhabiting the universe in all its rusted, repurposed, and resplendent glory. 

From the commercial towing vessel, Nostromo and its Starcub shuttle craft, Narcissus, to the imposing colonial marine gunship, Sulaco, and the Cheyenne dragonfly drop ship that gently glides down to the hostile world of LV-426, Alien is rife with riveting vehicles and installations to investigate and see what lies under their gleaming steel skins.

A deluxe new coffee table book from Titan titled Alien: The Blueprints docks in bookstores on Sept. 24 and explores the fantastic fleet of extraordinary machinery and habitats used to house, help, and transport humans, androids, and unexpected xenomorph cargo across the vastness of the cosmos with intricate details exposed for full inspection — and SYFY WIRE has your first class ticket inside its engineering wonders.

Alien Cover

Alien: The Blueprints is an absorbing 156-page collection of brand new blueprints dissecting all the important vehicles, ships, landers, machinery, and futuristic technology seen across the Alien movie spectrum.

Here artist Graham J. Langridge takes a deep plunge into the archives of official concept art, set designs, and SFX photography to recreate a series of full and accurate technical readouts and blueprints of the Sulaco, Nostromo, The Betty, Prometheus, Covenant, P5000 Powerloader, Hadley's Hope Terraforming Colony, Fiorina "Fury" 161 Mine and Refinery, and many more.

This intriguing edition covers all the Hollywood feature films in the sci-fi property's canon, including Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and enters our orbit next week as a must-have collectible and reference guide for any card-carrying Alien aficionado.

Alien Slice

Langridge explains that the book was developed because of his life-long interest in classic science-fiction horror and the design and construction disciplines that bring these stories to life.

“Drawing up the hardware featured within the Alien franchise was a blessing because each movie had its own design language within which I could immerse myself and just draft," he tells SYFY WIRE. "In other ways it was a challenge because for some subjects I had to have an understanding on how the hardware would work if it were real, going beyond what we see on screen and looking at the wider picture – but it was a challenge I enjoyed.”

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“It was exciting to analyze concept art and the thought processes that were created for each movie, look at the final design as we see it as the audience, then reverse-engineer it, understand why it was created a certain way, then move forward with further development of some elements such as that found within the Armored Personnel Carrier (Aliens, 1986) and inside the USCSS Nostromo (Alien, 1979)," Langridge adds.

"I strived to not contradict anything that we see on screen, and in many cases further exploration of the design was of areas just outside of the camera shot, trying to make the connection seamless.”

Now enter the bulkheads and breezeways, from port to starboard, of these iconic Alien technologies in the full gallery below, then tell us if you'll add this visionary volume to your collection when Titan Books' Alien: The Blueprints arrives on Sept. 24.