AJ: Which part of the book was most fun to write?
OW: Something that hadn't really occurred to me when I took the job on was that I'd have to essentially write it in character. The idea is that it's a handbook for marines in the field, so I had to write it as if I was some sort of corporate suit at Weyland-Yutani. That ended up being quite fun, because it's this weird line between writing a companion to the films and actually writing in-universe fiction.
And I tried to sneak a lot of jokes in, which might not be immediately apparent. I was afraid that the "voice", by its nature, would be boring, so I tried to play around with some references and in-jokes that fans would enjoy if they got them. There's a crack about "inexplicable lapses in safety protocols" in Prometheus that I know people have picked up on. And as I said, we weren't allowed to use the AvP movies or the comics or novels, so I had some fun making veiled references to those here and there; or references to discrepancies between different cuts of the different films, or between the films and the novelisations. Any time I mention something like "uncorroborated evidence" or dodgy intelligence, or stories that are probably apocryphal, I'm basically talking about something outside what's officially canonical. I even slipped a reference to Death Race in (Paul WS Anderson used Weyland as his evil company in that as well as in his Alien Vs Predator).
