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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

Well, I haven't read all the books, but I read several in my youth (because they were around), and they were much, much worse than the movies.

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Yeah even my trashy-genre-fic loving friend who's read all or nearly all the novels says only a couple are OK, and IIRC he said only one was really decent enough that he'd recommend it to others, versus the films, of which he likes a bunch. And he likes some bad novels (as he'll readily acknowledge) and plenty of older "classic" genre fic, plus some not-so-trashy British classics (Austen, Dickens, et c), so it's not a recency bias, or difficulty with the settings, topics, author's culture, or writing style.

Seems the film-makers largely agreed that it wasn't worth trying to preserve much from the books.

"Goldfinger", worse than the movie.

"Diamonds Are Forever" much better than the movie.

I thought Dr No was worse than the movie as well.

You’re the first person I have heard that from. We’re there any plots in particular that you thought were worse (barring man with the golden gun as that was contrived and I am not sure if Fleming even truly finished it before his death)?

Sadly, the reader probably figures out "Moonraker" within a few chapters.

In Fleming's "Goldfinger", Goldfinger is actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. It was much more realistic to have him instead trying to destroy the gold to increase scarcity.

Say what you want about the film "Live and Let Die" but reading Fleming trying to write "jive" was just embarrassing.

The one I remember best was "The Spy Who Loved Me", where the plot of the novel is about a woman in a cabin or something and the relation to the movie is... Zero.

But it wasn't the plots that I thought were worse, but the writing itself.

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