In praise of the novelization, pop fiction’s least reputable genre | Hacker News Reader

In praise of the novelization, pop fiction’s least reputable genre

quillette.com

42 pointshowrude23 comments

See also the mini-story on film novelizations from 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/mini-stories-volume-9...

A funny part of these is that the author often doesn't get to see the movie they're adapting!

> The novelization of “Alien,” for example, does not have a description of the alien, because 20th Century Fox wouldn’t let the writer look at the puppet while it was being designed. And in “The Empire Strikes Back,” the famously green character Yoda is described as having blue skin.

> Author Hank Searls went off the rails during his adaptation of “Jaws: The Revenge,” adding a plot about the shark being controlled by a “voodoo curse.”

Another funny anecdote in that category I didn't see in the article is Isaac Asimov's novelization for Fantastic Voyage. Because of filming delays the book was published 6 months before the film release, leading many people to believe the film was an adaptation of the book.

That novelization differs significantly from the movie, but mostly because Asimov thought the screenplay was filled with bad sci-fi plot-holes and was given permission to change whatever he liked.

Usually (having worked on the editorial/production side of some novelizations) the author is working from a script, because the book has to be written, typeset, and printed before the film is released.

The folks on the Hollywood side do not understand publishing schedules.

Licensed videogames before around 2000 commonly had this problem. They'd get an early script and have to build a game based on it. Sometimes, like with Ghostbusters 2, the script would change significantly over the course of the shooting / edit and there'd be game scenes that are no longer important / removed from the final cut.

The Dr Who novelisations were loved in part because they were the only way pre-video for the show's decades of output to be experienced. (And still are for some lost episodes.) I'd hardly ever seen an episode (as a late 70's 10 year old) but had read all the books I could find in the local library.

(I suspect they also inspired many kids to read for similar reasons.)

Novelizations and (less commonly) comic-adaptations of films filled this role generally, before home video releases were common & affordable. The Star Wars novelization, for example, didn't sell well because it was a great book, but because most kids couldn't re-watch the movie every single day like they could when the VHS releases came out, so they'd instead read a $1.25 mass-market paperback until it fell apart. They were chiefly memory-refreshers for the actual film. There was even a brief span of time in which audio versions (often of the film itself, not necessarily of the novelization, so, not exactly an "audio book") helped filled this role for some films, because audio cassettes & stereos/walkmans were more widely available & affordable than video decks.

Maybe I'm imagining it, but I wanna say there were things like re-cap books for seasons of shows like The X-Files, even, because home-video copies of entire shows were prohibitively expensive for all but the craziest fans. That's also part of what coffee-table type books about shows & movies were for—lore & encyclopedic content mixed with stills and what were effectively plot and episode summaries.

I loved the Dr Who novelisations, like you say they were the only way to experience the show except through the odd repeat. In many ways the books were better than the actual episodes, unconstrained by budget and time. I have been disappointed by many stories of Dr Who that I originally experienced as a child in book-form, what was filmed just doesn’t compare to my imagination.

In at least one case - "Warrior's Gate", the final Romana story, there was a "2001"-style vibe between the show and the book - i.e. both very good, but it was a lot easier to tell what was going on having read the book!

That was certainly one of the books I was specifically thinking about. From memory, the book starts somewhat before the show and explains the setup better.

The best of the books reworked the plots significantly, even when they were written by the original screenwriter. Sometimes what works on the screen doesn't fit the page and vice versa.

My parents were not movie people- never went to the theater, rarely rented movies. So my introduction to Star Wars was the Expanded Universe novels at the local library.

Around 1999, Microsoft had a pulp fiction division. The "Crimson Skies" game had a complicated backstory, which included references to fictional magazines such as "Spicy Air Tales". Microsoft had two volumes of that written and published, plus some other short novels.[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Crimson-Skies-Spicy-Tales-Fortunes/dp...

Crimson Skies was based on a tabletop game that came with a decent amount of world building material in the box. Tabletop wargame designers in general seem to love releasing source material that isn't directly tied to the game.

Crimson Skies was wonderful. Ok it took about 5 minutes to load each mission, but it was actually worth it. I miss that game so much.

Now that's a title worth a remake. Especially since Microsoft already has the Flight Simulator engine and huge areas of detailed terrain.

There is this wonderful page-by-page review of the novelization of Back to the Future:

https://btothef.tumblr.com/page/19

I felt sure this would mention Orson Scott Card's novelization of "The Abyss" which I thought gave much more depth for Lindsey (the engineer who designed the "Deep Core" drilling platform, played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio).

I'm not a fan of Card's other work (Ender's Game is a perfectly fine SF story, but didn't need a sequel let alone multiple sequels) but I thought this background really helps The Abyss much more than even the Director's Cut.

Or, if not that then B-to-the-F which is Ryan North's series about the novelization of Back to the Future, eventually published as an e-book - meta!.

But neither of them rates a mention, I guess that even if it lacks praise there was too much going on in this sub-genre to mention it all even in passing.

As the movie was filmed in Card’s home state, he was on the production site while writing the novelization. I understand he and the production team cross-pollinated off each other, contributing to both the film and the novelization.

I really enjoyed Cards ender sequels. They really start to convey a deep empathy for other human beings as they go along. There are no pure villains that you can fully objectify, even the worst of them are people with feelings. No problem if you didn’t enjoy them though, just wanted to say

So fun fact, Ender's Game was created entirely to set up the character Speaker for the Dead (the first sequel).

Space Odyssey trilogy did this right. Develop films and novels in tandem, with neither more canonical than the other. And both are all-time sci-fi classics, and Arthur Clarke's novels are definitely reputable and respected.

In any case, I think harlequin romance is probably considered less reputable than this.

I found the book much clearer and engaging than the film, tbh...

I am a fiend for novelizations. You can get a lot of insight as to what the shooting script might have been, for example, and sometimes some of your favorite writers are slumming it under a pseudonym. It can be an interesting game to guess the author if their prose has enough of a fingerprint and you care to do a little homework after.

Some of them are so good they bring additional life to the original, and buttress flaws -- Greg Cox wrote a trilogy about Trek's Khan that left me delighted with its ingenuity.

Speaking of, I wonder if the villains at Disney still owe Alan Dean Foster a lot of money.

Anyone remember those old DooM novels? Not exactly fine literature, but I did enjoy them as a kid. Resident evil had a cheesy but fun novel series too

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