Professor Killjoy

Apparently Professor Ian Stewart from the University of Warwick thinks sci-fi film-writers are being unimaginative when they make their aliens too-human like. Probably has a little something to do with budgets or a lack of gaseous cloud-shaped actors.

He then lays into the Alien movies and I quote:

"The dragonesque alien queen lays her eggs, which are apparently about the size of a football, in the open where they apparently wait for thousands of years for a spaceship to land near them. When it does, any that have survived hungry egg-eaters for all that time hatch out. They have the immediate ability to invade terrestrial mammalian hosts and live inside them, where the nutrients are just right for them. How did they become able to avoid our tissue-recognition immune system? Or how to design just the right local anaesthetic so that the host doesn't know he's got an object the size of his heart - extra - in his chest? Are they turned to people, in fact, or are they general-purpose parasites - a concept that would make any parasite specialist scream?"

Yeah, you're right Ian, those dratted film-makers forgot science and made an entertaining story. How dare they!!!

The best things is that Prof. Stewart apparently writes his own sci-fi with non-humanoid, scientifically realistic aliens. I bet it's a real page-turner...