This is so common it’s not worth blinking an eye at any more. There was some talk when Ron Goulart (under the name of Joseph Silva) did a novelization of Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau back in 1977, but that’s a lifetime ago in movie terms. Face it, movies are so different from books that it’s almost a cheat to tell people to read the original. And novelizations are designed to be read in one-quarter the time of actual Victorian-era books. Everybody makes money and the authors are safely dead.
Rotating, but dead.
P.S. That was Fred Lerner, not Fred Turner, that I meant to refer to.
Was Goulart’s novelization titled “H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau?” I think what Brainglutton was commenting on was the fact that the title of the novelization he mentioned included the name Mary Shelley, even though she was, of course, not the author of that book.
Gardner Fox did a novelization of Nine Weeks in a Balloon in 1962, to show you how far back this crap goes. I’m having a hard time visualizing a Goulart version of Dr. Moreau, though. I keep on seeing Ben Jolson (if I remember the name of the Chameleon Corps operative correctly.) Goulart did do the continuation of the Avenger series, which I think he did a good job on.
Actually a properly made movie of The Last Astronaut would be hilarious. The hero being oblivious to suffering around him is what the Abrahams’ movies and Police Squad were all about - they’d be perfect to write a screenplay for this book.
It’s a short story, not a novel, even if it was published in book form.
Besides it reads so much better on the original typewritten pages. It just looks like something that ought to be written single-spaced, margin-to-margin, not all fancied up with print.
Actually, the badness of the Eye of Argon is somewhat overstated. Sure, the prose is purple as hell and there are some howlers, but considering the author was in his teens when he wrote it, he needs to be cut a bit of slack. He still manages to tell a coherant story.
As for the many typoes in the original, there is some evidence that they had been introduced long afterwards, when it was retyped.
Sure, it’s bad, but there’s plenty of fan fiction that’s even worse.
My favorite snippet from the random quote generator has got to be:
It is my new mission to figure out how to use “mind wallaby” in conversation.
As to the thread, and I know some are going to hate me for this, but I have to nominate Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein. 200 thousand some odd words of of late 60’s / early 70’s pseudo-intellectual tripe. It probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it didn’t try so damn hard. The thing is filled with such profound statements as:
That seems a strangely selected quote from SiaSL. Do you take it that Heinlein is, with that pair of sentences, somehow trying to offer anything profound?
Heinlein first got the idea that became Stranger in 1948. After several false starts, including a major amount of work in 1953 and 1955, he restarted writing in in late 1958 or early 1959 and finished by spring of 1960. It was published in 1961, well before any such creatures as hippies existed, whom he hated passionately along with everything else that characterized the 60s.
The original manuscript weighed in at around 220,000 words but was cut down to about 150,000. After he became so famous that his laundry lists would sell, i.e. after his death, the original uncut manuscript was issued. That may be the one you’re thinking of. However, the 1961 Stranger remains the book that book most have read and remember.
When I was 19 I thought the book was as fantastic as anything I had read. Then I turned 20.
However, pseudo-intellectual tripe is a bad way of characterizing the book. The notion that god is in everything is hardly original to Heinlein, being the basis for several religions, and is perhaps the only form of religious expression that can be taken seriously. There are many reasons for denigrating or dismissing Heinlein and I can reel off hundreds any time you ask. But these aren’t any of them.
I respectfully disagree. I called it “pseudo-intellectual” precisely because the idea didn’t originate with Heinlein. It’s been around for a long, long time. When Heinlein has a Martian bring this very old and well known human idea to the humans themselves as if it were new, he is coming dangerously close to claiming that the idea is new. (He even goes so far as comparing the character to Prometheus). If an author implies that a common idea is somehow unique to the book, even though it’s obviously not, he is being pseudo-intellectual.
This quality of Stranger in a Strange Land is precisely why the book is more popular with teenagers than adults. Teenagers are amazed by the concepts in the book, while adults realize that Heinlein is only recycling old ideas and implying that they are somehow unique to the Martian character. If we define “pseudo-intellectual” as seeming more profound on the surface than in actual substance, then Stranger in a Strange Land certainly qualifies.
