Alien: Earth begins where most Alien stories end: with a crew of blue-collar workers realizing that they are, and have always been, doomed. Deemed expendable by their employers over the monsters in the cargo hold (at least the crew of the USCSS Maginot, unlike the Nostromo, knew the monsters were the mission), they are made mortally aware of their place at the bottom of several food chains at once. With the FX show's fifth episode, cheekily titled "In Space, No One …," creator Noah Hawley takes us back to the Maginot's corridors to give viewers a rendition of Alien in miniature, retrofitting the sturdy bones of Ridley Scott's seminal film to his own ends. This may sound like a cynical enterprise, but it's par for the course for Alien. As Slate's own Sam Adams has noted, the series is Hollywood's greatest non-franchise, a collection of films (and comic books and video games) constantly remixing a few primary colors into compelling new shades.

One of the most perfect things about the original Alien is its fiendish simplicity. Driven in part by technical limitations, the movie largely confines its glistening monster to the shadows, and keeps the reasons for its existence similarly obscured. Driven purely by the instinct to drive and reproduce, the xenomorph--a designation the creature didn't even acquire until the second movie in the series--is both a perfect killing machine and the ultimate plot device. It not only requires no explanation but allows none, because the alien's very nature means that no one who might be in a position to pass on information about it survives to do so. Simplicity, however, is not really Noah Hawley's thing.

The recent Hulu movie Prey, a prequel to the 1987 sci-fi horror film Predator, pits a young Comanche woman against a brutal alien hunter. Science fiction author Zach Chapman loved the new movie. "It's definitely my favorite Predator film," Chapman says in Episode 524 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I think it's the only one in the franchise that has a theme--or at least that commits to a theme in a meaningful way--and the action is super awesome." Prey has been a hit with audiences and critics alike, a much-needed boost for the franchise after flops like The Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem.

On June 1st, 2022, I received an email: "We're excited to have you as an early tester in the Midjourney Beta!" A week has now passed in what feels like a couple of hours. The image above was generated as a result of me writing a sentence filled with various descriptors about a yellow tent and a nature-filled landscape. As an artist, I've been cautiously curious about the application of AI learning to the creative industry. After finally dipping my toes into this pool by generating some prompts of my own, I was ready to swim.

One of the biggest AI-driven titles of modern times, Alien: Isolation brings the terror of the xenomorph to video games. While the alien, LV-426 and many other key elements of the franchise have previously been explored, Alien: Isolation takes a different route. A horror game steeped in the aesthetic and style of Ridley Scott's classic 1979 movie: in which the player is trapped on the Sevastopol space station with a single, intelligent, near-invincible alien. For this experience to play out as expected, the alien itself has to carry a large amount of the experience: a demanding feat for any AI in an industry in which non-player characters are either heavily scripted or suffer really short life spans. So how did developers Creative Assembly pull it off?

Researchers from Australia have discovered a new species of wasp named'Xenomorph' because of its similarities to the monster from the Alien movie franchise. Dolichogenidea xenomorph injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and then the larvae slowly eat the other bug from the inside out. When they've had their fill, they burst out of the caterpillar and grow into adult wasps - before repeating the cycle all over again. Researchers from Australia have discovered a new species of wasp named'Xenomorph' because of its similarities to the monster from the Alien movie franchise Xenomorph is one of three newly documented parasitoid wasp species - a kind of wasp that needs to kill their host to complete their life cycle. 'Dolichogenidea xenomorph acts as a parasite in caterpillars in a similar way that the fictional Alien creature does in its human host,' said lead researcher Erinn Fagan-Jeffries, PhD student in the University of Adelaide's School of Biological Sciences.

In space, no one can hear you laugh. Ridley Scott's extraterrestrial adventure "Alien: Covenant" is deadly serious about matters that he takes deadly seriously, and the only things that he derides with any irony--muffled and sardonic though it may be--are the movie's snippets of art greater than his own, by artists greater than himself--starting with Richard Wagner, whose "Entry of the Gods into Valhalla" is heard in the first and last scene. The movie's lack of irony is all the more ironic since its subject is the recklessness of mankind in daring to synthesize humans androidally in order to extend our own control over the universe. The pleasure of classic low-budget science-fiction films--the threadbare apocalypses of the nineteen-fifties--is the fusion of authentic fear with the earnestness inherent in comic-book-like creatures and effects. They were movies that, in their exuberant exaggerations, wore their own absurdity with a fiercely straight face, even as they touched on underlying terrors--largely also focussed on the hubris of recklessly manipulating nature.