[HN Gopher] In praise of the novelization, pop fiction's least r...
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In praise of the novelization, pop fiction's least reputable genre
Author : howrude
Score : 36 points
Date : 2021-07-05 19:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (quillette.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (quillette.com)
| vmilner wrote:
| 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.)
| handrous wrote:
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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...
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Now that's a title worth a remake. Especially since Microsoft
| already has the Flight Simulator engine and huge areas of
| detailed terrain.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| hairofadog wrote:
| There is this wonderful page-by-page review of the novelization
| of Back to the Future:
|
| https://btothef.tumblr.com/page/19
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| 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."
| gxqoz wrote:
| 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.
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
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