Originally published March 22, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1479
It is not easy working in a field that is treated by many with unadulterated disdain. A field that is, in fact, often blamed for the deterioration of literary quality across the board, and believed to be bringing ruin and dámņáŧìøņ to us all.
No, surprisingly enough, I’m not talking about comic books. I am speaking instead of media-related novels.
You know the ones: novels tied into such series as X-Files, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5, etc. The popular notion among many is that these books are springing up all over to the detriment of science fiction and fantasy with far more “merit.” That they are weeds choking the life out of the pure green lawn of SF/F. That they are keeping far worthier books off the shelves, and slowly smothering the entire literary SF field to the point where the entire industry is going to collapse.
That’s a lot to lay on a genre.
Now obviously, I’m not going to feel dispassionate or unbiased on the subject. I’ve written more Trek novels than I can readily remember. I’ve written novelizations and tie-ins to Babylon 5, and I wrote the upcoming novelization of the Spider-Man movie. And I should just note, as an aside, that people who think a novelization is a cakewalk are obviously people who have never done it themselves. The average screenplay is 120 pages. The average manuscript is 350 pages. You do the math and figure out just how much the novelizer has to bring to the party in order to get the job done, ranging from explaining plot holes to expanding characterization to developing entire additional storylines that integrate seamlessly with the rest of the movie. As Alan Dean Foster reportedly commented at a convention, turning a movie into a novel can get you labeled as a hack; turn a novel into a movie, by contrast, and you could get an Academy Award.
There seems to be this warped perception that if all the media tie-in novels went away, that would free up space for this mythical flood of dazzlingly wonderful novels which currently aren’t seeing the light of day. Somewhere out there, there are hard-working authors who can’t get their books a fair shake because those dámņáblë media tie-ins are taking up all the editorial time and energy of the publishers.
Now I admit there’s a downside to media books. When I was shopping Sir Apropos of Nothing, many publishers dismissed it, and me, out of hand because I was mostly known for writing Trek novels. Not only was it assumed that my work was automatically inferior, but it was further assumed that people who read my Trek books (or, for that matter, my comic book work) would never in a million years pick up a straight-up fantasy novel by me. Of course, not every fan would. My reasoning was that it only required a percentage of the readers who followed my other work to purchase Apropos to make it a success. Almost no publishers saw it that way. So despite years of working in the publishing industry, and dozens of books published, I was being treated as a first-time author. Even having gotten books on the New York Times list didn’t matter because those were “only” Star Trek novels (blithely ignoring the fact that most Trek novels don’t hit bestseller status.)
But setting aside my personal experiences, let us ponder just how many authors there are out there who are sending in their novels and not getting a fair shake because of media tie-ins. Well, kids, here’s a hot news flash: The vast majority of would be break-in novels are unpublishable. Years ago Theodore Sturgeon, when faced with the comment that ninety percent of published SF is crud, replied that ninety percent of everything is crud. This promptly became engraved in stone as Sturgeon’s Law, and time has not diminished its accuracy. And break-in novels not only don’t beat the law, they probably exceed it. They don’t call stacks of unsolicited manuscripts “slush piles” for nothing. All the media tie-ins do is the job of enabling publishers to survive so they can provide a marketplace for those new writers to send their material. Publishers are starving for quality work. Now if fans and would-be-writers want to cling to the notion that the existence of media tie-ins is preventing new work from seeing print, rather than the simple lack of material that isn’t garbage, then they can do so. They can continue to use Star Trek or Star Wars as convenient whipping posts and cheerfully ignore the fact that media tie-ins help keep SF sections and publishers alive. And oh, by the way, look… there’s the readers’ noses. Perhaps they want to take a shot at cutting them off to spite their collective faces.
What infuriates me is the dismissal of media tie-ins as having any worth.
First and foremost, I have the same reaction that I have to parents who are flipping out because their kids are reading Harry Potter. “Oh my God, oh my God, little Jimmy is reading books about magic! Our children are being destroyed.” Setting aside that there is not one documented case of a child—inspired by the books—flying about on a broomstick and playing Quidditch, the obvious response to these howls is, “Hey, jerkface, at least the kids are reading something!”
In this day and age, with a staggeringly small percentage of the US population constituting an incredibly large percentage of the buying audience, readers are becoming a dwindling commodity. If a bookstore is able to make its payroll that week because some kids who ordinarily couldn’t be bothered to read are interested in snapping up the Spider-Man novelization, I have zero problem with that.
Second, I am sick and tired of media-related novels being dismissed as garbage, trash, worthless, etc. The notion is that anything media-related is automatically of no value implies that every novel not media-related is of far greater value. It is a pea-brained reader who somehow feels that a well-written Star Trek novel is by definition inferior to a poorly written “original” novel, or has less right to exist.
The galling truth that snobs don’t want to wrap themselves around is that any number of bookstores and publishers owe their fiscal health to those much despised licensed tie-ins. In the great mall of book publishing, they are the anchors, the Sears or Macys that pull people in due to name recognition. And all those fun, charming, and entertaining non-chain stores in between Sears and Macys (or Star Trek and Star Wars) survive in these dicey economic times thanks to those very anchors that the oh-so-savvy fans openly despise.
Not only is there no guarantee that if media books went away tomorrow, the SF sections would be filled to the brim with new and exciting genre novels, but I will instead wager that bookstores would just as likely shrink down their SF sections and expand proven genres such as mysteries or Harlequin romances.
People wonder why it’s SF series that attract tie-in series more than any other genre. That’s easy: It’s because those people who watch SF on television tend to be more literate and intelligent. So naturally they would be more inclined to support book series that tie-in with TV shows.
And finally, around the time that people started telling me they were using Riker’s poem from Imzadi as their wedding vows, or that my novelizations made movies more watchable and enjoyable because they filled in all the gaping holes left by the filmmakers, or that New Frontier enabled them to enjoy Star Trek again, I came to the realization that these media-related endeavors are just as entitled to move, enlighten and uplift readers as any other novels.
So I suggest to all those who show nothing but disdain for licensed tie-ins that they might consider broadening their horizons or, at the very least, show a little freakin’ respect for a genre that not only is not, to my mind, destroying SF, but instead helping it to survive.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
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Well said.
You can count me proudly among fans for whom New Frontier is the best example of Trek. It proudly embraces the best of the tropes and traditions of Roddenberry’s vision while eschewing the clunkier, less sensible, more boring parts. It’s easily my favorite example of 24th century Trek.
I have a fond memory of visiting a Babylon 5 mall tour while reading the hardcover of the first four books. I guess this would have been around 1998, so I’d have been 22. I would carry around a backpack everywhere, so I’d have (among other things) whatever I was reading handy. I noticed you at the exhibit and figured, “hey, why not?” I asked you for an autograph and you were flattered but flabbergasted that I happened to have it on me. Good times.
You can count me amongst those as well. One thing I always loved about New Frontier was that the characters weren’t the same at the end of the book. They could change, they could grow, they could get married, they could get injured. If Kirk got married in a book… you knew dámņëd well she was going to die by the end. If Geordi got his sight back… you knew dámņëd well he was going to be blinded again. If Sisko grew his hair out… you knew dámņëd well he’d start shaving again. If Harry actually got promoted… you knew dámņëd well he’d get demoted again. (Which leads me to wonder if he ever got promoted even in the books… but I digress).
It seemed like, from the first few post-Nemesis novels, that they finally doing much the same in the TNG line (especially with the Rikers going off to the Titan) but I have no idea if that trend continues. One of these days I’ll re-catch up lol
And Q-in-Law remains to this day one of my favorite books, period. That’s some quality work, media tie-in or no.
Star Trek novels led me to Peter David. Would I have bought Sir Apropos without having read Imzadi? Probably not. And my life would be le
The Battletech novels led me to Michael Stackpole, and to more military SF in general, which led me to David Weber and Elizabeth Moon, among others.
Rarely have I purchased a tie-in book of some kind, without also buying an “original” book in the same purchase. But certainly my case supports your belief.
David McDaniel’s “Man from UNCLE” novels are just fun.
Alan Dean Foster greatly expanded the plot of Dark Star.
And Sturgeon insisted that it was “Sturgeon’s Revelation”, not “Sturgeon’s Law”.
And i was present when Bloch’s Corollary to Sturgeon’s Revelation was propounded: “…and your agent gets the other ten per cent.”
Tie-ins are no better or worse as a genre than straight novels (though i do have to admit that the source material does tend to boost the 90% number a bit).
Hmmm – “…can tend to…”
I’m surprised no one has mentioned this article, which, remarkably, appeared on the same morning as the BID reprint:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/business/media/popular-tv-series-and-movies-maintain-relevance-as-novels.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
I point out that my brother’s first book (Insurrection), which launched his career as a best-selling SF writer and also paid out its advance relatively quickly (not something most first books do, i believe) is basically a media tie-in.
I just think it’s kind of sad that movie tie-in novels (beyond the jr. novelizations) have largely disappeared. The last Marvel one to get one, I believe, was Iron Man 2.
I miss them. Those were always something I looked forward to.
Novelizations do rank high on my list of favourite reads. Ala Dean Foster and PAD being two of the main reasons why. Dealing with plot holes can be a chore, yes, though sometimes there’s only one way out: it never happened, as was the case when Foster explained the ridiculous animated TREK plot of people aging backwards in COUNTERCLOCK INCIDENT by writing it off as alien illusion or some such. Had the Q been introduced to TREK before then, it could have been the Q equivalent of April’s Fool gag.
Getting back on topic, what bothers me about ‘media tie-ins’ is that there aren’t nearly enough of them … in the other direction. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t glance around my lair and its main decoration: wall unit after wall unit, all full with rows of mostly paperbacks, two or three deep, and wonder why the studios don’t get there’s this treasure trove of material waiting to be made into big screen films. Enough to keep the major, and many minor. American and UK studios busy for a decade or three. I still recall that happy tingly feeling I experienced when the rumour reached here about JMS having optioned the LENSMAN series of books.
Instead? All too often, remakes or sequels. Some times, sequels of remakes. *sigh*
You’re right. For example, I wonder why nobody has started to film a mini-series based on John Gardner’s “The Secret Generations”. The first book of the trilogy would be perfect for that (sort of “Downton Abbey” for the spy world).
One of the best media tie-in books I ever read was The Abyss by Orson Scott Card. Card adapted the movie in every other chapter. The storyline alternating with the movie story shed light on other characters so the ending made much more sense.
Never read the book, but now I’m kinda curious what Riker’s poem was.
Any helpers?
Funniest story about a media tie-in i can think of:
The Star Wars novelisation was listed as having been written by George Lucas – no other name. (Though there were stories pointing the finger at one particular person.)
As i recall, it makes a big point about how the other denizens of the cantina were amused seeing that Greedo had let Han get his hands under the table.
As i also recall, it said that Han shot first.
“Setting aside that there is not one documented case of a child—inspired by the books—flying about on a broomstick and playing Quidditch,”
Flying around no, running around with a broomstick between their legs playing quidditch on the other hand….
Is Spider-Man the only actual adaptation you’ve done (as opposed to things like your Star Trek novels, where you wrote your own story using pre-existing characters and setting)?
I would think that doing a film adaptation would be a stressful experience. I assume you would have to sign the contract before you’d be allowed to look at the script, so you’d have no idea if the story is even worth telling until you’ve already committed yourself.
Then you’d have a very strict deadline, since the book absolutely has to be in the stores when the movie comes out.
And you have no idea whether the director is even going to stick to the script they gave you. A lot of scripts go through major changes while they’re filming, after all. There have been cases where they shot entirely new endings after test-screenings.
And of course, if the book is really good, and a big seller, you get none of the credit. Everybody says it did well because the movie was so good.
I know he’s done both Hulk movies, all three Raimi Spider-Mans (Spider-Men?), and Battleship. I want to say Iron Man and a few others.
In fact, checking his wiki page: The Rocketeer (Ooh!), Batman Forever (Ooh! – I always liked that one, I know I’m the odd man out there), Fantastic Four, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and After Earth, and two B5 movies (In the Beginning and Thirdspace) and says his B5 trilogy was “based on an outline” by JMS.
And also that there was a fourth Sir Apropos book in 2009 that I had no idea about and therefore must track down immediately. Although now I see it’s from IDW, so it’s probably a graphic novel, which explains why I haven’t heard of it *g*
Mary, if I recall correctly (and it’s been over a decade since I read them, so I may not), The Spider-Man novelization had the original World Trade Center ending and Star Trek Generations had the Soran shooting Kirk ending, so your point is very valid.
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Regarding Star Trek and Star Wars novels in general, I’ve always liked them better than most “new universe” novels because the author could jump right into the story without having to explain in depth who all of the parties were (new characters and species, sure, but the foundation and backdrop is already there). I find it similar in that regard to reading historical fiction.