Aliens Movie Question

[BARLOW]

In the Alan Dean Foster novelization of Aliens, Ripley is asked what it is by Gorman, and she says "I really don't know. I think I've seen something like it once before, but I'm not sure. It's different somehow. more elaborate and-" at this point Gorman cuts her off an says, "Let me know when your brain starts working again." On the next page, Dietrich says, "Looks like some kind of secreted glue. Your bad guys spit this stuff or what, Ripley?" and Ripley says "I- I don't know how it's manufactured, but I've seen it before, on a much smaller scale." There are a lot of little details in the novelizations of the first two book that make them worth reading, and the first two books (I haven't read the others because I no interest in the movies) seem to go off in slightly different directions at times giving you little bit of information left out of or not thought up by the screen writers of the movies. The Alien in the original novelization explodes as soon as it is ejected from the Narcissus into space. This does not happen in the movie.