True, the first one looks a bit “Gah, why did I eat those jalapeños?!”
Author Habits That Annoy You
- Thread starter Captain Dax
- Start date
Got to say, Gary’s attitude notwithstanding, Dehner most definitely did not come across as sexless.
Harrumphing at movie covers seems a bit "lit-snob".
Or at least a bit ivory-tower . . . .
Which makes no sense to those of us down in the trenches.
I was unaware of that. This paragraph fascinates me:
As Transmigration (which is not sf) is one of my favorite PKD novels, I'm glad he turned the novelization but also disappointed by how little Transmigration paid.
The weird thing about the Blade Runner novelization is that it was written, designed, and published as, basically, a kids’ book. It’s not exactly a kid-friendly movie. I was 19 when Blade Runner came out and already a PKD fan, but I didn’t know the Les Martin book existed until well into the Internet era. Looks like I got my copy in 2000.
Christopher Wood had previously done a novelization of The Spy Who Loved Me, which was wildly different from the Fleming original. I bought it, but wasn’t enough of a fan of Moonraker to get that one.
Last edited:
In general, no author (or agent) in their right minds would agree to a competitive novelization. You want your book to benefit from all the hype and excitement about the Major Motion Picture, not some other book based on the movie.
That's why most novelizations of movies based on books involve public-domain classics: Bram Stoker's Dracula by Fred Saberhagen, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Leonore Fleischer, etc.
I recall at least one instance where the studio wanted to put out a novelization instead of the original novel; the author's agent nipped that idea in the bud right away!
That's why most novelizations of movies based on books involve public-domain classics: Bram Stoker's Dracula by Fred Saberhagen, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Leonore Fleischer, etc.
I recall at least one instance where the studio wanted to put out a novelization instead of the original novel; the author's agent nipped that idea in the bud right away!
I enjoy his YouTube videos too. Very informative and nice analysis.
Yeah, Fleming wasn't terribly happy with his novel The Spy Who Loved Me (which was told from the POV of the woman Bond gets involved with over the course of the adventure, with Bond himself not even appearing until something like halfway through the book), and made it a part of his deal that a movie version could only use the title. So the movie of TSWLM is close to a remake of the movie version of You Only Live Twice.
Well I'll be. Today I learned! Thanks.
I'm honestly surprised Future Noir doesn't mention it. (I went back to check, I don't trust my memory.)
Interesting. I've always wondered why a living author would allow a competitive novelization if the original novel was still under copyright.
Boy, Fleming must have really not liked that story -- or maybe he just didn't need to worry about royalties anymore.
Well, yeah, generally the arc of such characters was to start out cold and aloof, but then reveal that they secretly had womanly desires that were awakened by the male lead, or potentially could have been -- remember the Keeper revealing that Number One secretly had fantasies about Pike (a plot beat that Strange New Worlds has mercifully left untouched). Even Susan Calvin was in unrequited love with a colleague in her debut story, "Liar!" Dehner's arc is similar, except she connects to the male guest star instead of the male lead.
Yeah. I just looked up the novel on Wikipedia to see if there were any statements from Fleming on how he felt about the book, and here's what it said:
The reviewers were largely negative, with some expressing a desire for a return to the structure and form of the previous Bond novels. In a letter to his editor after the reviews had been published, Fleming reflected that "the experiment has obviously gone very much awry".
Following the negative reactions of critics, Fleming attempted to suppress elements of the novel: he blocked a paperback edition in the United Kingdom and, when he sold the film rights to Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, they were permitted to use the title but none of the plot of the book. In the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth in the Eon Productions series, only the title and the character of one of the villains, Jaws, are taken from the book.
I had the exact thing happened when I ordered a copy of Minority Report so I could scan the story and teach it; I unexpectedly ended up with that weird chapbook. Pretty much impossible to scan, too! I haven't seen my copy, though, I wonder what happened to it.
There were some movie tie-in collections of Dick stories branded as Minority Report (complete with Tom Cruise on the cover), but also Gollancz just took its existing Days of Perky Pat collection and started publishing it as Minority Report instead, no license needed I guess.
Yeah this is my only real issue with e-books. Although it's not always a bad thing, a while back I bought the regular edition of Assassin's Apprentice, and a few months after I bought it they released a new fancy illustrated edition with a bunch of new artwork, and they changed my copy to the illustrated one. So I basically got the new edition, which is usually two or three times more than the regular one, kind of for free. I was in shock when I realized they did that.
I do like how Disney handled the John Carter movie novelization, it had both the movie novel and the original A Princess of Mars together.
Occasionally, when a Matheson short story got turned into a movie, I would put together a collection highlighting the adapted story, along with enough of Matheson's other stories to make a decent-sized book, and publish it with some movie tie-in art on the cover. Did that with The Box (based on "Button, Button") and Real Steel (based on "Steel").
But I always made sure the cover copy made it clear that the book was a short-story collection, not the novel.
They didn't sell as well as What Dreams May Come or I Am Legend or even Stir of Echoes, but short-story collections and anthologies seldom sell as well as novels, even with a movie tie-in cover.
But I always made sure the cover copy made it clear that the book was a short-story collection, not the novel.
They didn't sell as well as What Dreams May Come or I Am Legend or even Stir of Echoes, but short-story collections and anthologies seldom sell as well as novels, even with a movie tie-in cover.
Last edited:
I will point out that Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey is a novelization. The movie was based on several short stories (one of which, "The Sentinel," I've read; it was in something like my 7th or 8th grade reader, as I recall, and also in a "making of" book), and the novel and screenplay were developed concurrently. (Speaking of 2001, one of the questions it left unanswered was, "if the zero-gravity toilet uses 'dalkron eliminators,' what exactly is 'dalkron'?")
Sure. But even from the beginning of the episode — and I suppose this may just be 2026 talking — Dehner comes across to me not as cold, just as not wanting to be bothered by this obvious horndog.
That's exactly why it isn't a novelization. A novelization is a prose adaptation of a story that originated as a movie (or TV show or comic or play or whatever). Since the two versions of 2001 were developed simultaneously and symbiotically, neither one can be called the original. The movie is as much an "adaptation" of the book as vice-versa.
A fair point, but you can still see the trope's presence in the story, even if only from Mitchell's perspective. And yes, I think there is a generational difference. At the time, the cultural expectation was that women went into the workforce in hopes of snagging a husband, so a woman staying strictly professional and rebuffing a man's advances might have been perceived as cold and unfeminine.
This reminds me of a weird anomaly in the 80s when a few competing novelizations of movies were written by different authors and published by different publishers in the UK & USA. I first noticed it with The Terminator (Shaun Hutson wrote the UK adaptation, Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher wrote the US version), and it also happened with Friday the 13 Part 3, Ghostbusters and Capricorn One... Some kind of territorial rights issue, probably.
Similar threads
