I first caught this still image years back on a blog dedicated to “typesetting from the future.” It is, of course, a frame grab from Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979), in which Sigourney Weaver sets her spacecraft to go bang ten (cinema) minutes later. Those of us who sat through it in the theatre forty years ago had only a second to absorb those flickering photons, but thanks to the miracle of digital media, unforeseen in that primitive era, we can See What They Did There (including the misspelling of “abort”).

I did this sort of thing now and then in print over the course of my alleged career, including when I typeset a simulated page for a commercial catalogue that included the designation “Model RU-486,” this being in fact the designation for the so-called “morning-after pill,” lately in the news, and causing the usual suspects to wax very wroth indeed (the “in the news” part, I mean. I’m fairly certain that my meaningless subversion was never detected).

Does it strike anyone else, incidentally, that an interstellar cargo hauler’s self-destruct unit is not likely to be engaged on multiple occasions? The “used spacecraft” trope gained in currency after Star Wars (Tarkovsky got there first half a decade earlier, although of course a Soviet production was never Coming to a Theatre Near You if you happened not to live in a college town or a capital-M major urban center), but those keys are pretty grimy for a one-time emergency component.

cordially,