You know who I think would have been perfect to do the novelization of that movie? Peter Watts. Come on, biologist with interest in embodied cognition and a great talent for coming up with all sorts of crazy and off the wall but scientifically hard stuff and portraying very alien creatures in interesting and sympathetic ways. He already did something similar with The Thing.Shroom Man 777 wrote:I always liked Species and felt very partial to Sil's character. It helped that she was very sexy. And, yeah, she was kind of the ultimate victim in the movie. Artificially created, and then sentenced to execution for a wrong she never committed? And then, lost in the outside world and with nothing to guide her but her brutal killy alien instinct? Then she gets burned alive, along with all her babies? Poor girl.
The novel did have some interesting tidbits that could have been taken to interesting places. Like when they notice that they haven't been finding any signs that Sil has been eating after she became an adult and start speculating about her life cycle. It's not mentioned, but it made me think of these insects I heard about on a PBS program where the adults don't even have mouthparts, I guess they just live barely long enough to reproduce before they starve to death. It would have been poignant if Sil was like that, and she must mate before she dies of starvation in a couple of weeks.
One problem I wish the book would have addressed was the huge fridge logic problem of how Sil's descendants are supposed to keep their alien traits after multiple generations of interbreeding with humans. I mean, logically they'd have only 1/2 as much alien DNA after every generation. Even if all the alien traits are heterozygous dominant they're going to start losing them pretty quickly in a couple of generations. Give it 5 or 6 generations and they'd probably be virtually indistinguishable from baseline humans.
Maybe that's thinking about this wrong. One way proposed to perpetuate cloned extinct animals when you can't create a clone of the opposite sex is to get it to mate with another compatible animal (if available) and then back-cross the hybrid offspring to the parent to breed out the traits from the other animal. Maybe that's what Sil was trying to do. Mate with a human male and produce a hybrid son that she could then mate with to found a breeding colony.
The problem is that this means a horrendously inbred population, but maybe occassional outcrossings with humans could supply enough genetic diversity to keep the species viable without hybridizing it into effective extinction. It would help if the alien traits were heterozygous dominant. Plus exotic biology may make it more feasible.