Oooh, low blow! 
I’d have to say Turn of the Screw. What the fuck was going on?
For me it’s the opposite. In my naive youth, I always assumed the book would have much more detail than the movie and might even be quite different from the movie, but nevertheless worth reading. The first time I picked up a movie novelization that was basically just a transcript of the movie, I was disgusted.
Wouldn’t it be a wonderful irony if the guy who writes these novelizations of movies based on books was actually a talented writer and turned out world-class prose…
Beautiful!You know what’s scarier than that? That people actually bought the sequels.
But not me.
…Uh, didn’t the novels come first??? 
Judging by the OP, I took the topic to be limited to the the original novels only.
I saw the movie based on Toni Morrison’s *Beloved * and enjoyed the performances, if nothing else. A friend told me the book was much better. When I finally read the book for an English class, I had to force myself to finish it. At least with the movie I didn’t have to suffer through Morrison’s annoying, pretentious prose style and almost unintelligible flashbacks.
:rolleyes:
Please, please read Stand up on Zanzibar. You have to realise that Brunner started off the early part of his career being paid to write pulpy sci-fi by the book. He managed to get a pretty decent income by writing a 200 page novel every six months but with barely any of the craft you see in his later works. However, even then, he managed to churn out some amazing works. However, the work he did early in his career is nothing like his later works that made him famous. It was only later in his career that he was financially independant enough and had gained enough of a reputation to engage in some deeper and less time restricted works. His “Dystopia triad” of “The Sheep Look Up”, “Stand Up on Zanzibar” and “The Shockwave Rider” are, IMHO, some of the most prescient and far looking books of speculative fiction that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. And his largely ignored “The Great Steamboat Race” written just a few years before he died showed his mastery of human portrayal extended well past his sci-fi roots.
Sorry, I’m just a completely unashamed Brunner devotee and I would sorely hate for someone to pass off on the oppurtunity to explore his work purely due to the hack work he was forced to do to make a living.
Uh, did I say every 6 months? That man published an astounding 27 novels in a six year period. :o
Has there been a novelization of Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet? :dubious:
I’m gonna get bopped for this, but the king of novelizations, Alan Dean Foster, actually wrote some pretty decent science fiction of his own. Read his Flinx novels (The Tar-Aiym Krang and the rest of the series)
As we’ve noted in a long-past thread, there have been pretty decent novelizations, too. Orson Scott Card’s The Abyss novelization was highly praised by James Cameron, who actually used portions of it in fleshing out his characters while they were filming. 2001 enjoyed a somewhat similar relationship to the film, the novel and film influencing each other. he novelization of the Sherlock Holmes movie a Study in error was by “Ellery Queen”. The novel of Forbidden Planet is as unusual as the movie itself, which it diverges from in a not-stupid way. Asimobv’s novel of Fantastic Voyage similarly diverged from the film (at Asimov’s insistence), and is, IIRC, still in print.
And, lest we forget, the inconsistencies in the novelization bothered Asimov so much that, years later, he wrote Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, a story with totally different characters that only retained the “shrinking/injection” premise. So here we have an original work, inspired by the novelization of a movie, by the same author.
The music goes round and round…
I had so many people tell me I HAD to read the Celestine Prophecy - it was EXACTLY the type of book I would just LOVE.
With such endorsement I decided to make it one of my free choices through Book of the Month club. Ugh - what a waste of a freebie. It was so badly written I literally laughed out loud at times and didn’t even make it a third of the way through the book before giving up on it. I’m not commenting on the point of the book - whatever that might have been…I just simply couldn’t endure the bad writing long enough to find out what the point was.
Now I friends telling you HAVE to read the DaVinci Code! That I would just LOVE it. Let’s just say that based on my prior experience I’m not interested. Is it really only ‘a hair’ better than Celestine Prophecy? If so I know to save myself the energy of tracking down a copy.
As so far as Frankenstein goes - the original is great! But considering it has become so twisted in current pop culture so that ‘Frankenstein’ is the monster…is it really so surprising there are a multitude of hack jobs out there? It really has become more than just what it was intended. The substance of which has greatly decreased with it’s popularity…if that makes sense.
What the hell is that?!
No way! I would have been like hiring Vonnegut to write a paper on Vonnegut! 