The dictatorship affords Gould a certain stability for his business interests, but at the expense of local freedoms. He manipulates the fledgling country’s government by contributing funds to a dictator. Senor Gould is the wealthy owner of a silver mine.
In Nostromo the novel, the wealthy also take advantage of the workers. It is Weyland-Yutani that has knowledge of what awaits the Nostromo on LV-426, and it is Weyland-Yutani which sends the ship down with the ultimate purpose of bringing the xenomorph lifeform back to Earth for experimentation and implementation as a biological weapon. The corporation that owns the ship is Weyland-Yutani, and they are the ones that take advantage of the hard work that these future blue collar employees are providing. The crew are trying to make a living – tugging a refinery through deep space. In Alien, the USCSS Nostromo is a working class freighter. In the fictional country of Costaguana, he is a hardworking foreigner, someone that the citizens are able to trust because of everything he has done for them over the years. In the novel, the character makes a name for himself as being reliable. The name conjures up a sense of responsibility based on that fact alone. Nostromo in Italian means boatswain, the officer in charge of the crew on a ship. When they needed a name for the main ship on which the original 1979 film would take place, Ridley Scott decided to use the name of one of Conrad’s most famous characters (it also happens to be the name of the book in which he is featured). For one, Conrad was one of Ridley Scott’s favorite authors.
So, what does Joseph Conrad have to do with Alien? A lot, actually. His books travelled to the far corners of the Earth, and what he found there was not inspirational, but deeply depressing. In a time when the glory of imperialism was quickly coming to an end, Conrad described exactly the toll humanity had paid for its rapid development over the last century.
He managed to explore the relationship between man and the world around him, not through traditional adventure, but via a haunting portrayal of greed and corruption. Conrad’s writings would go on to gain great notoriety by the turn of the century. He spent the next 23 years of his life at sea, and it would be these experiences and adventures that would later inspire him to write. At the age of 16 he left his home and travelled to Marseilles, France to become a mariner. Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in the Ukraine.
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