But you'd be doing a public service for your fellow board members, by helping us to avoid something so horrid!
New 40th anniversary edition of ST:TMP novelisation?
- Thread starter Therin of Andor
- Start date
But you'd be doing a public service for your fellow board members, by helping us to avoid something so horrid!
Will you pm the name & title? I’m interested in knowing what & who, but will definitely not be buying it, since my TBR pile already numbers over 10,000.
Yeah, it’s true.
Or fellow Board members might buy the damn thing out of the same sort of morbid curiosity that causes people to look at train wrecks of the more literal sort. (I'm firmly convinced that roughly half the overwhelmingly positive reviews I've seen in online bookstore web sites [and the two "thumbs-down" ratings given to my own negative, but far from scathing, review] are from friends -- or maybe even sock-puppets -- of the author, roughly half are from people who own -- and are willing to be seen in public wearing -- red MAGA baseball caps, and those who don't fall into either category haven't enough sense to see the gaping plot holes and broken author-reader contracts.)But you'd be doing a public service for your fellow board members, by helping us to avoid something so horrid!
The one good thing about it (and I only just noticed it today) is that "The Book Which I Will Not Name" was self-published (not subsidy-published by a known "vanity house"; literally self-published, the way the International Printing Museum published The Surgeon Factory*), and managed to make it into the bookstores (and any self-respecting bookstore will turn down anything with a known vanity imprint, and do so with extreme prejudice). So it's proof that one can get a genuinely self-published opus into the bookstores.
_____
* The Surgeon Factory is a fictionalized memoir of surgical residency at the hospital now known as County/USC, by the late Ken Rascoe, MD. We published it at the Museum, printing it entirely by letterpress, as a Museum project; our lead docent, Leland Whitson MD, is the author's nephew. I personally cast a few Ludlow slugs for the project. Oh, and unlike "The Book Which I Will Not Name," The Surgeon Factory is actually good.
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I've long been curious about Roddenberry's unpublished original SF novel. (I think the titles was "Messages from Earth" or something like that.) It probably wouldn't have been good, and the concept wasn't original -- alien comes to Earth and tries to report to his superiors about what humans are like.
Neither of these would be the book you're describing -- Christopher Paolini's Eragon or Andy Weir's The Martian -- but I had similar reactions to both. The Martian, especially, which was as cardboard and superficial as one of the 90's "Tom Clancy" novels, the anonymous novels in, say, the Power Plays series. I know it's a beloved book among my friends group, and it was a page-turner, but characterization outside the main character was super weak.
In "The Book Which I Will Not Name," the only characters weaker than the protagonist were the cardboard-cutout black-hat villains.
And if it's rare that I find myself in absolute total agreement with CLB, well, it is absolutely unheard-of for me to be in complete agreement with Allyn Gibson. Don't just "be afraid; be very afraid." Be absolutely terrified.
And if it's rare that I find myself in absolute total agreement with CLB, well, it is absolutely unheard-of for me to be in complete agreement with Allyn Gibson. Don't just "be afraid; be very afraid." Be absolutely terrified.
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You severely overestimate my willingness to knowingly spend my limited financial resources on garbage.
Enjoyed the book - grabbed me right from the first paragraph. The movie was also good and a surprisingly (mostly) faithful adaptation of the book. FWIW, I read the book before the movie happened and was already picturing Matt Damon as Whatley. His follow-up Artemis was pretty good, too.
For me it was the opposite. I really enjoyed the novel, but the movie was very meh.
Artemis is a pretty damn good book.
Thank you @Christopher and @Therin of Andor for the clarification about the TMP novelization for some reason, I confused the TMP novel with what happened with ADF ghostwrriting for Lucas on the first Star Wars novel. A stupid gaff on my part. Im sorry.
But I still stand by my opinion that movie novelizations should NOT disappear just because you can own the movie now in many forms faster than ever before. Novelizations are important process to explore thoughts, feelings, motivations and deleted scenes and deleted concepts not seen in other media.
A question for @Christopher though. Was writing Ex Machina easier or harder to write and incorporate the TMP novelization in your work? Looking back with the passage of time, is there anything you can say that you could have done differently, would have done differently in your book? Where you restricted by Pocket's editors in any way? Where there concepts you wanted to use but couldnt?
I'm hoping the 40th anniversary book or ebook has all the original text but maybe some cool thoughts or annotations by ADF or other Trek authors who helped contribute to the creation of the TMP story or concept or were influenced by it as @Christoper was.
My thanks to all,
-Koric
But I still stand by my opinion that movie novelizations should NOT disappear just because you can own the movie now in many forms faster than ever before. Novelizations are important process to explore thoughts, feelings, motivations and deleted scenes and deleted concepts not seen in other media.
A question for @Christopher though. Was writing Ex Machina easier or harder to write and incorporate the TMP novelization in your work? Looking back with the passage of time, is there anything you can say that you could have done differently, would have done differently in your book? Where you restricted by Pocket's editors in any way? Where there concepts you wanted to use but couldnt?
I'm hoping the 40th anniversary book or ebook has all the original text but maybe some cool thoughts or annotations by ADF or other Trek authors who helped contribute to the creation of the TMP story or concept or were influenced by it as @Christoper was.
My thanks to all,
-Koric
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That's not a question I can answer. I chose to incorporate ideas from the novel, because the novel was the first version of the story I ever experienced, so it was an integral part of what I wanted to build on. It's not like it was a condition that was imposed on me. It was just something I took for granted.
I think it's a given that any author looking back on a past work will see things they could've done better or differently. But I'm still pretty proud of what I achieved there. I was only a couple of years past earning my BA in history at that point, so my studies in cross-cultural and world history were fresh in my mind and I was able to do a very detailed job of worldbuilding, one I'm not sure I could match today.
No, Marco Palmieri was very supportive and helpful. He let me tell the stories I wanted to tell and helped me tell them better. He did resist a couple of my bad puns and jokes, but ultimately let me stand my ground on those.
Unfortunately there seems to be several forces resisting the addition of "bonus material" in novelisations in recent years. Some readers (and movie makers) want the novelisation to accurately reflect only the movie now. And the level of secrecy seems to make the writing process very hard for the novelists.
Problem is these days a lot of studios are forbidding novelizations from embellishing on things like that and are requiring them to stick to the script and nothing else. A silly rule, IMO, since it pretty much destroys the only real relevance a novelization can have in the modern world where movies are usually available on home media within six months of theatrical release.
The one exception seems to be the new Star Wars movies, which are allowed to embellish on things in the novelizations. Though at least in the case of The Last Jedi and Solo those novelizations weren't released until the movies were released on home media anyway.
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I don't really understand why most of the studios won't let the authors include extra content in the novelizations these days, it really defeats the whole point of even doing them.
One I have bought but haven't read yet that I'm very curious about is Suicide Squad. From what I've seen, it's apparently based on an earlier version of the movie/scrpt than one that ended up in theaters, so it's pretty different from the final movie.
One I have bought but haven't read yet that I'm very curious about is Suicide Squad. From what I've seen, it's apparently based on an earlier version of the movie/scrpt than one that ended up in theaters, so it's pretty different from the final movie.
Liked for the Funky Flashman reference. #Excelsior!
Considering how serialized TV and movies are nowadays, the studios maybe don’t want any contradictions at all with any future movies that fans might think were in the movie. I remember reading the “Home Alone 2” novelization in the late-90’s and the author had the hair cutting lawnmower scene, and then I saw “Home Alone 3” and the movie used the same scene. It didn’t contradict but at the same time the movie was reusing a scene.
Which is already something the new Star Wars movies have had a brush with. The novelization for The Force Awakens includes Rey and Poe meeting each other, but then in The Last Jedi, we get a scene in the movie itself where Rey and Poe meet making it clear they hadn't met before.
Which is still kind of weird, since Rey and Poe are standing next to each other at the end of TFA when they all look at the map.
But they weren't properly introduced. They were part of the same group but never really talked to each other.
I experienced this with a Blish episode adaptation of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday". When Kirk and Scotty are in Kirk's quarters discussing ship repairs, Scotty mentions they have nowhere to go in this time. In the book, he adds that they'd hit the Vegan Tyranny, and "you remember what happened when we ran into them". I kept expecting to hear that line in subsequent reruns, but never did. That's because the Vegans were the villains of Blish's Cities in Flight series, never part of Star Trek...
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