You know what I mean - Movie comes out; becomes hit; cheap “novelization” of script come out to cash in on popularity.
Like to know your thoughts on these. Will anyone own up to reading any? I read qute a few when I was really, really young and couldn’t let go of a favorite movie experience. I can’t imagine reading one now. But apparently somebody does. They even come in hardcover. Were any written that were good enough to stand on their own?
Do you think “novelizations” are novels?
What I always found funny was when there were books based on novels. So, you’d go into the bookstore, and find the original novel, then next to it, the novelization of the movie.
A few were:
The Abyss by Orson Scott Card. James Cameron says in the intro that he was annoyed with the novelizations of his movies (he doesn’t say so, but he’s clearly pissed off at the novelization king, Alan Dean Foster, who, IIRC, did Aliens and others of his), so he wanted it done right. So he went to SF author Orson Scott Card, who started writing before the cameras rolled. He gave Card’s writings to the actors, who incorporated Card’s backstory and psychology into their interpretations of the characters they portrayed. As far as I’m aware, such on-the-spot interaction is unique in a “novelization”, which is usually written from a completed script by someone who has no direct interaction with any of the other people involved. Cameron insists that Card’s book isn’t, and should not be called, a “novelization”.
A Study in Terror – Mystery writer Ellery Queen wrote this novdelization of this interesting “Sherlock Holmes vs. Jasck the Ripper” movie, adding his (their?) unique insights. I’ve never seen this, but I’d love to read it.
Star Trek – James Blish wrote these novelizations of the original series shows, and, from his comments, he did sometimes contact the authors. Blish is also one of the SF great writers.
(By the way, Foster is a pretty good SF writer himself, but his novelizations aren’t of the same quality as his books.)
Forbidden Planet W.D. Stuart’s novelization differs significantly from the movie, but is intelligent and consistent. It gives a very different spin. Published twice, once by Bantam to coincide with the film’s release, then about a decade later by Tempo books. Hard to find now.
True. They did this with the first remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau (The Burt Lancaster/Michael York version).
They also did it with the 1982 remake of The Thing. The novelization by the omnipresernt Alan Dean Foster came out instead of a reprint of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?”.
Christopher Wood also came up with novelizations of the James Bond films Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me, for which he wrote the screenplays. His are easily the worst Bond movies, but at least the quality of his novelizations is better than that of the screenplays. He makes a lot of his ludicrousness seem almost reasonable.
Aside from the Wood novels, I haven’t read these, but they’re reportedly awful.
By the way, some novelizations were written by respected SF/Fantasy writers who were apparently slumming:
David Gerrold wrote the one for Battle for the Planet of the Apes
L. Sprague de Camp, who wrote many Conan the Barbarian stories in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, wrote the novelization for the movie Conan the Barbarian
Piers Anthony wrote the novelization for Total Recall (why not re-release Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale”, bundled with Robert Sheckley’s “The Status Civilization”?)
Vonda McIntyre wrote a couple of novelixzations for the Star Trek movies.
Isaac Asimov famously wrote the novelization for Fantastic Voyage, which has probably been in print longer than asny other novelization.
As a kid I loved them.
Gremlins 2 was a great read!
Vonda McIntyre’s version of the second Star Trek film fills in a lot of the blanks and greatly enhances the Saavik characterr.
Related to this, I once, ahem, acquired what I thought was the original radio broadcasts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It turned out to be the book-on-tape version of the novel.
I’ve read quite a few (many of Alan Dean Foster’s)
The only one I can think of that was significantly better than the movie was “Fun House”
Dean Koontz was just starting out, having a couple books published, when they came to him with the script and asked him to do the novelization. He hated the script, but needed the money, so while the movie was being shot, he wrote the novel, giving the characters much more character, motivation and backstory.
In fact, the novel is about 4/5s over before the events in the movie even start.
How can I forget? It’s in my sig line right now.
Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey arguably does Orson Scott Card’s one better, since he wrote the original short story on which the film was based and tusseled with director Stanley Kubrick on the film, having much more influence over the direction in which both the film and the novel went. You can read some of the rejected versions in The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Clarke. In fact, this is so close to the creative process that it might not fall into most peoples’ definition of “Novelization”.
Even literary sf curmudgeons Barry Malzberg and Thomas Disch have written novelizations. The pay is very good, especially since the deadlines are usually ridiculously short so that they don’t take much time away from real work. Not that that improves quality, but nobody considers that an issue.
In fact it’s very hard to say whether quality matters at all with a novelization. Certainly the vast bulk of buyers are after the movie name, not the author name.
CalMeacham, I can’t call 2001 a novelization, BTW. Clarke and Kubrick were true collaborators on the film and Clarke has always maintained he wrote the novel before the screenplay was finished, although his diary notes show that it was more complicated than that. Still absolutely antithetical to the standard notion of a novelization.
A Study in Terror is available for two bucks through BookFinder. Even the true first edition - Lancer 73-469 - can be had for $10. It’s now thought that the movie novelization portion was ghosted by Paul Fairman, a hack who ghosted regularly for more famous writers, but that the Ellery Queen material at the beginning and end was Danney and Lee themselves, the first Ellery Queen material they had written since 1957. (For those who don’t know the story, Lee had serious writer’s block and allowed Avram Davidson and Theodore Sturgeon to ghost three EQ novels about EQ. Furthermore, they had turned the Ellery Queen pen name into a house name and peddled a bunch of non-EQ books as by Ellery Queen.) I’ve never seen the movie, but the novelization is interesting because they threw out the movie solution to tack on an Ellery Queen solution at the end. Interesting not being the same as good.
I didn’t know there was a novelization of Total Recall. And Piers Anthony, blech!
There was almost a novelization of Blade Runner but Dick decided at the last minute that the integrity of the source was more important than the money. Good for him. Although there were a few K.W. Jeter novels set in the world of the movie, like the further adventures of Rick Deckard or something.
Er, isn’t Gerrold pretty much always slumming? I mean, he’s an okay writer, but his attempts to emulate Harry Harrison, C.S. Forrester, and Robert Heinlein always came off as kind of kind of…well, second rate.
Ian Fleming’s Thunderball was essentially a novelization of a story and screenplay developed by him, Kevin McClory, and Jack Whittingham prior to the launch of an actual Bond film franchise, leading to the now-infamous conflict between McClory and Eon Productions. It is, IMHO, one of the best of his highly variable novels. Fleming’s competator/inspiration/imitator, Leslie Charteris often novelized episodes/TV films from the Roger Moore series of The Saint (a character he introduced in short novel/novelette format several decades previous). None of them are great literature, but they make nice, well-prosed light reading.
A rather bad novel, The Edge of Human, was based on a proposed sequel to the film Blade Runner, by some author whose name I’ve tried to forget.
Stranger
I always see the novelizations come out before the movie is released.
That said, novelizations are IMO more than cheap-ass attempts to cash in on a movie; for some films (especially the summer action-packed circuses), they can provide a depth that the movie lacks. I actually preferred the novelization of the Hulk movie more than the movie itself for that reason.
And the fact that it was written by Peter David (who wrote the Hulk comic book for over a decade) just tickled my funny bone to no end. 
I used to read novelizations a lot when I was a kid. Ones that stick out in my memory include “The Last Starfighter” (Alan Dean Foster, IIRC), “Ladyhawke” (Joan D. Vinge), the Vonda McIntyre Star Trek movie novels (1-4), and TRON (Brian Daley?).
I still pick one up occasionally, especially now that I live in Japan and am occasionally starved for English reading material. I think that most novelizations these days are written before the film comes out, or is even in the can in some cases. Note that in many movies, the credits state, “Read the novel from _____ Books.”
Also, since the books are written in advance, sometimes when the filmmakers re-edit the film before release, the books don’t show this. Case in point: Men in Black II, where the movie ending and the book ending are quite different.
Here’s another slumming SF writer: Manly Wade Wellman wrote the novelization for the 1940s movie Dr. Cyclops under the “house name” of “Will Garth”. I’ve got a reprint of this one.
There was a break after Christopher Wood’s two Bond novelizations. No one wrote any more until License Renewed, which John Gardner (who had been writing the “new” James Bond books) wrote the novelization for. He also did the novelization of Goldeneye. He stopped doing the Bond books after that, and Raymond Benson started doing “new” James Bond. He did all the subsequent novelizations, too.
Yeah. Another one where the novel was better than the movie (though some would say it wasn’t hard ).
I still have my dog-eared copy.
Murray Leinster did a “novelization” of Time Tunnel, the old Irwin Allen series, perhaps because he also had a previous novel called Time Tunnel - totally unrelated. He also did the Land of the Giants novelization.
Keith Laumer did the first book for The Invaders series. Theodore Sturgeon did the novelization of the movie “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.” Dave van Arnam and someone else whose name escapes me did the TV series Lost in Space. It was an interesting approach, very different from the series. Tom Disch did two books for The Prisoner.
We were friends with the author of a major mystery series who did a novelization. No royalties, just a flat fee, but easy money - more typing than writing.
As for the Blish Star Trek books, the first two volumes in the series were far better than the later ones. In his introductions it was clear that his benefit from them was increasing the audience for his real books.
Apparently, Alan Dean Foster also ghost-wrote the original Star Wars novelization.
I have a soft spot for that one, being strongly motivated to read it when I was in first grade–it was rather over my head and I picked up a lot of advanced vocabulary words. I still remember words like lambent and malevolent from the first page alone.
McIntyre didn’t do the novelization for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That was, God help us, the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself, Gene Roddenbery. Having read it, I’m convinced he really did write it, and it’ not a ghost job like “George Lucas’” novelization of Star Wars, which, as noted above, everyone seems to agree was by Alan Dean Foster.
That brings to mind another Lucas film novelization by a noted author – Ben Bova did THX 1138.
I used to read these a lot as a kid.
The last one I read was the Independence day Novelization.