James Blish, master of interstellar sf, e.g., Cities In Flight, adapted Star Trek scripts as short stories and wrote the first original Star Trek novel;
Isaac Asimov novelized Fantastic Voyage, then wrote a nominal sequel that was in fact an original novel on the same theme;
Jerry Pournelle novelized Escape From The Planet Of The Apes and transformed a cliched clergyman into a sympathetic character.
Thus, each of these authors added some creativity.
These remarks are occasioned by the fact that, last night in our small sf group, John summarized the current POTA film trilogy for Kevin and me.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I kind of agree with you in being glad Anderson never novelized a feature film. But, I think he would have done a good of it if he had!
Problem is, most TV and movie science fiction strikes me as being thin, shallow, and superficial. Reading the works of such masters of science fiction as Anderson, Asimov, Bradbury, Clark, Heinlein, and Norton as a boy kinda spoiled TV and movie SF for me. Because I keep comparing, unfavorably, the latter to the works of the authors I listed.
I have argued in my "Textual Crawl For Flandry Movies" article that, if done well, movies based on the adventures of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry could be good films. I suggested that "The Game Of Glory" might be a good choice for experimenting with that idea.
Sean
I've done novelization spin-offs; of the "Babylon 5" tv series, and the "Terminator" movies. The latter was interesting because I had to try and make sense of the convoluted time-travel plot, which is the sort of thing that makes your head hurt.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I have read at least one of your Terminator novelizations. And the fact I read it with pleasure indicates you did manage to make sense of the original Terminator movies. MY view is that when Hollywood tries to do time traveling, they make a botch of it! their efforts are certainly NOT as carefully thought out as Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories.
Sean
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