The making of Blish's novelizations
- Thread starter Neopeius
- Start date
McIntyre put so much extraneous material into her novelizations (especially TSFS) that I believe she was asked by the editors (or Richard Arnold) to tone it down after that.
Hardly the only way, since they were in constant strip syndication practically everywhere in the country. There were times when you could catch two reruns per day on different stations, if you were in a major market or had cable. I watched the reruns on TV so often growing up that I had them virtually memorized.
What I suppose you mean to say is that the novelizations were the only way you could own the episodes and be free to revisit them on your own schedule, instead of having to wait for a rerun to come around again on TV. And sometimes they had scenes that were cut out of the syndicated episodes to make more room for commercials, but since the adaptations were cut down too, they often lacked things that the episodes had. I usually preferred rewatching TV reruns over rereading the adaptations, which were either too truncated and inaccurate (in the early volumes) or so slavishly exact that they added nothing I couldn't get from watching TV (in the later volumes).
On the other hand, TAS reruns on television were fairly rare over the years, so for a long time, the Foster adaptations were my only way of revisiting those.
"Extraneous" is kind of a judgmental word. The fact that novelizations added stuff that wasn't in the movies was one of their primary appeals. Arnold may not have liked it, but many readers did.
I think the objection came from the fact that novelizations often came out before the films in those days, to help create buzz for the films before they hit theaters, and many people were disappointed that the movies didn't have all the stuff they liked in the novels. So the people behind the movies got jealous, and studios started cracking down more on novelizations to embellish less. So the additions may have been "extraneous" from their perspective, but not from the readers' perspective.
One should also note the Bantam/Mandela photonovels published from 1977-78.
I didn't mean anything negative about the word 'extraneous'; sorry if it sounded that way.
Maybe in the US but in Australia it may have been 10 years between re-runs aside from those in the late 70s and early 80s. We ddn't even see TNG or ENT in prime-time on original run. In the last couple of years TOS has been shown during the day just in school holidays - I wonder who there target audience is but I'm grateful for it.
Those are really neat. I have several of them.
You're a mensch. I like it when people are civil in their discourse!
I didn't like the Blish novelizations growing up -- too truncated. But I am enjoying at least these early ones, in context, because they are a weird, independent thing. And we don't have Trek reruns yet in January '67.
And the Foster ones were excellent. I appreciated how much they expanded on the episodes (which, being so short, really were aided by the expansion). So much to look forward to!!!
The TWoK novelisation had some great stuff about Peter and Saavik but my favourite part was the research staff on Regulas 1. I read TWoK before I had seen TMP so the Deltans really sounded amazing. The scenes where they are tortured for information was brutal but you really start to care for them.
A bit off-track, but the whole matter of embellishment in novelizations reminds me of how James Luceno's novelization of The Shadow (1994) went to some effort to fit the movie into the worlds of both the pulp novels and the radio series, which never really meshed with each other in the first place. There was even convoluted extra backstory from the pulps; an aspect that the movie had omitted completely... and thankfully, since it would have bogged down the narrative.
Kor
Kor
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Is that what the kids are calling it now?
Quite. I can't stay in 60s mode all the time (and she sent me an email, so...)
Fotonovels were the bomb.
Here’s a nice blog entry on the series:
https://tainthemeat.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/star-trek-fotonovels/
Here’s a nice blog entry on the series:
https://tainthemeat.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/star-trek-fotonovels/
I loved John Byrnes New Visions as well. It would be great to have a set of TOS photonovels alongside.Fotonovels were the bomb.
Here’s a nice blog entry on the series:
https://tainthemeat.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/star-trek-fotonovels/
That’s a great site.Fotonovels were the bomb.
Here’s a nice blog entry on the series:
https://tainthemeat.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/star-trek-fotonovels/
As computer advances continue, perhaps a smart 3D printer with Kerr’s 11-foot study as a baseline….could produce the ships you see on the novel covers via extrapolation.
The Blish books? Why would you need to go through all that trouble just to build minor variations of the Enterprise? You can extract the perspective and Z depth with a pencil and a ruler.
There are some real oddities to how the Enterprise was illustrated on some of Blish’s books. The saucer underside looked to be rather flattened with no lower dome. The B/C deck superstructure on top the saucer looked to be perfectly round rather than teardrop shaped. The dorsal looked inverted so that it was shorter at the top and longer where it attached to the secondary hull. And the fantail cutout on the secondary hull looked to be longer. In some respects it looked like an older design predating the Enterprise.
On other covers it looks very much like they just used an AMT model kit as the basis for the illustration.
On other covers it looks very much like they just used an AMT model kit as the basis for the illustration.
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