10 Comments on “Find Out Why Tobias Buckell is Happy Today”

1. Hi, this is my first post on your website, I’ve read Old Man’s War and the Ghost Brigades and liked them both very much and will order The Last Colony eventually, I have some other books to read though. Basically I decided to read every Hugo/Nebula award winning book and have 1953-1965 at the moment of the Hugos. I’ve read The Wanderer (meh) and Way Station (better but weak plot and execution of said plot) so far. I had already read Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune, both of which are excellent, I leant Stranger to someone, it’ll come back one day, maybe. Come to think of it it’s how I found Old Man’s War in the first place, I needed a new book and found a Wikipedia page for nominees/winners, I was going to get Spin but OMW sounded more interesting.

   I didn’t mean to write the last paragraph, it just sort of happened, I’m sure you understand. I really am posting to ask a question about Books based off of things, movies, games (halo), shows and so on. I’ve never read one because I figure they’re crap. I know though that, that is an assumption based off of nothing so I wanted to ask about them. Basically I figure they’re contracted out by corporations to make money. It brings the idea that the person they hire just can’t be into something that isn’t really of their own creation and that they’ll get money for it and whatever. They’re probably on tight schedules and much more interested in their own ideas.

   A decent parallel would be video games based off of movies, TV shows. The vast majority of which are complete crap. Not that there aren’t good games, Spiderman II, Chronicles of Riddick, and so on, but still there’s a lot of weak games out there.

   Again though I don’t speak from experience. I’m sure it’s not set in stone, there are good books and horrible ones based off things that get contracted out, but I was just curious if it seems like the author’s who get hired to do this aren’t able to fall into these stories as well and make them theirs, because they didn’t originate with them and they might not have the creative liscense they’d like.

2. Ohio strikes again!

3. Hooray for food on the table!

   I’m looking forward to Sly Mongoose.

4. Also, to reply to Matt @1: I’ve always thought the novelization of Enemy Mine was a hell of a lot better than the movie. Of course, the movie was based on a novella first, and both the novella and novel were written by Barry Longyear, so that probably doesn’t support jack.

5. Matt Stapley (#1): There are novelizations that add something to the movie, and there are really good tie-in books. For example, John M. Ford’s Star Trek tie-ins, or Orson Scott Card’s novel of The Abyss.

   Adam Rakunas (#4): something similar could be said of John Varley’s 1983 novel Millennium which was the basis for the eventual (1989) movie (and was itself expanded from the 1977 short “Air Raid”).

6. Jeez, that’s gotta be like a license to print money. With the press, paper, ink, and plates thrown in. Good for him.

7. Matt-the Halo books seem to be the exception to the rule about adaptations. Probably because bungie is more committed than most game companies to a solid back story (the infamous “halo bible” that contains info on tons of people, places and things that may never appear so that things remain consistent), the novels are pretty solid. At least the ones by Eric Nylund-the second in the series, which he did not write, was mediocre, but it was also a tough assignment, as its plot followed the narrative of the first game (which btw none of the other books do, being prequels and between stories, probably another reason they are better, not being strict “adaptations”).

   If you like Old Man’s War, you might want to try The Fall of Reach. It reads as something of a cross between Starship Troopers, with training chapters, powered armor, and decimation at the hands of aliens, and Ender’s Game. The latter due to the training of soldiers from childhood, with the added moral qualms of them being subjected to Weapon X type physical enhancements. Nylund is a pretty effective writer, and has a good hand with getting the reader to understand the difficulty of characters’ choices.

   Thanks for posting this John-sounds like a good day for Mr. Buckell.

8. Woo, another Halo book! Yet another reason to try and find a few of his books, so I can get a feel for his writing before the Cole Protocol comes out. Good thing I was planning on doing that anyway.

9. the novelization of Enemy Mine […] the movie was based on a novella first

   This kind of thing hurts my brain. The most bogglesome example I’ve seen was in the CV part of the cover blurb of a Fred Saberhagen book: apparently he wrote a novelization of the Gary Oldman Dracula film. Ow.

10. As the kids say, w00t!