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you know, books of variable quality written for your favorite movie/TV show/video game. Here's one I actually got from a Scholastic Book Fair In the 2000s, people put real effort into creating a coherent novel continuity for Star Trek. This book came out, uh, well before that. it's a below-average plot (here are half a dozen characters you've never heard of! one of them's a murderer! can you guess which?) but written serviceably. The worst thing about it is that it led me to seek out other Trek books, which, in the 90s, was a pretty dire loving subgenre
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Apr 2, 2023 23:21
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i read the first two splinter cell books and loved the poo poo out of them cuz they were immersive (used first person) and all stealthy just like my fave games but then i cracked open that third one and they had gone and switched the pronouns. guess it was truer to the actual splinter cells to be written in third person but i wasnt sam fisher anymore so gently caress that, middle school me said
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Apr 2, 2023 23:35
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cumpantry posted:i read the first two splinter cell books and loved the poo poo out of them cuz they were immersive (used first person) and all stealthy just like my fave games but then i cracked open that third one and they had gone and switched the pronouns. guess it was truer to the actual splinter cells to be written in third person but i wasnt sam fisher anymore so gently caress that, middle school me said Oh, interesting! I've actually only read the third Splinter Cell book, which I thought was decent enough. Given I have an extensive range of other Tom Clancy books, I'm not sure why I never got around to getting the other SC ones. It does seem odd that they'd switch from first person to third, though.
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Apr 3, 2023 06:57
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I read a buttload of the Star Wars novels, stopped right as the Vong books started. I read the novelization for Independence Day in like a day and a half then immediately went to see the movie in a theater as a kid because we were visiting family in Pennsylvania and there was nothing to do in that town.
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Apr 3, 2023 13:13
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There was a tie-in prequel book to BIOSHOCK that I found surprisingly enjoyable. The only bad parts for me came when the author was clearly told he had to work in some bit of 'lore' for people because you could feel him going through the motions a little in those sections.
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Apr 3, 2023 14:43
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DrVenkman posted:There was a tie-in prequel book to BIOSHOCK that I found surprisingly enjoyable. The only bad parts for me came when the author was clearly told he had to work in some bit of 'lore' for people because you could feel him going through the motions a little in those sections. yeah, i like that it followed Bill McDonagh, i listened to the audio book version and the voice the narrator puts on for sander cohen is loving french mistake level gay lisp. i found it weirdly funny.
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Apr 3, 2023 15:41
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disaster pastor posted:you know, books of variable quality written for your favorite movie/TV show/video game. Here's one I actually got from a Scholastic Book Fair I remember enjoying Peter David's New Frontier books a lot back then - I think that was what kicked off the novel continuity. I devoured them as they came out and re-read them two or three times after that, but I bet I would enjoy them significantly less if I went back now. Some of what he came up with was cheesy even for Star Trek, some of it was really cool. The captain Mackenzie Calhoun was a former teenage warlord who got plucked off his hellworld and sent to Starfleet Academy by Picard himself! Commander Shelby from Best of Both Worlds was his on-again/off-again lover... and then assigned as his second-in-command once he took command of the starship Excalibur! I think there were a couple other characters from the TV shows mixed in that I'm forgetting. The security officer was a stone-skinned Hulk-alike from a species called Brikar (lol) that was named Zak Kebron; I guess they've included a Brikar as one of the characters in the new Star Trek cartoon as a nod to these books, which is nice. The chief engineer Burgoyne 172 was from a non-binary/intergender species and consistently used the pronouns "s/he" and "hir." And I felt like the aristocrat character Si Cwan from the fallen Thallonian empire Starfleet sent them to patrol was a far, far cooler outsider character than Neelix, by comparison with the TV shows. But the plotline climaxes were often kind of cheesy, looking back: at one point, they encounter the "Great Bird of the Galaxy" as a gigantic space phoenix that hatches out of the core of a planet they were supposed to save, destroying it; and the last book I somewhat clearly remember was an amnesia-trope arc where Calhoun had to recover his memory while employing his badass warlord skills after the ship blew up and scattered the crew.   To be honest, the Deep Space Nine relaunch novels that ran into the mid-2000s kept me into Star Trek more than anything at that time; I couldn't stand Enterprise or the Abrams movies. They had a couple of cool original characters, the grizzled replacement first officer for the station who had a mysterious past and may have been associated with Section 31, and the good-guy Jem'Hadar that Odo sent to build bridges and help out Kira. But even then, they kind of suffered from small-world syndrome - IIRC the plot climax for those tied the Conspiracy parasites from TNG S1 to the Trill symbionts, and Sisko's big return from the wormhole to save them from that was kind of an anticlimax. Just whump, he's back, he used wormhole powers to save everybody from being infested by the parasites -- come back next book, there'll be more Sisko! I fell off permanently after that.
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Apr 5, 2023 07:30
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Is that Dr. Selar in the middle?
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Apr 5, 2023 13:16
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istewart posted:I remember enjoying Peter David's New Frontier books a lot back then - I think that was what kicked off the novel continuity. Hilariously, they had Peter David write a book for the "main" continuity, and it was so incredibly terrible (Janeway's the new Borg queen! the Borg eat Pluto! the Enterprise crew mutinies against Picard so he doesn't sabotage negotiations with the Borg!) that they had to spend multiple books undoing the damage he did, and David never got asked to write anything Trek outside of New Frontier again. It's a shame, Q-Squared is actually a really good book, but dude lost it as he got older. Cthulu Carl posted:Is that Dr. Selar in the middle? Yup.
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Apr 5, 2023 15:01
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I read the Elder Scrolls novels, The Infernal City and Lord of Souls, and I loving loved them. I'm a massive TES fan, in fact a lot of my favorite short stories of all time were from TES, and these two surpassed my expectations on what an Elder Scrolls book could be. But I am going to admit that it's because they contain a lot of cooking and I am a sucker for food scenes in books. They aren't perfect, either from a writing standpoint or an Elder Scrolls fan standpoint, but my expectations were low to begin with and these books surpassed them.
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Apr 5, 2023 15:07
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the totally bizarre doom series is an example of this because it goes place also the aliens tie in series had some gems
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Apr 5, 2023 17:13
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Didn't the Back to the Future novelization have a scene with a nuclear explosion because it was based on an earlier draft of the screenplay?
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Apr 5, 2023 17:23
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I remember reading a SeaQuest DSV novel as a kid. No idea what it was about, though. I'd probably read it again though because it was season 1 SeaQuest because I remember the cast picture on the back and season 1 SeaQuest was great
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Apr 5, 2023 17:25
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Augustus Snodgrass posted:Didn't the Back to the Future novelization have a scene with a nuclear explosion because it was based on an earlier draft of the screenplay? Oh it's an in-story film. Weird. https://gizmodo.com/is-the-novelization-of-back-to-the-future-a-literary-ma-5894664
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Apr 5, 2023 17:26
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Upgrade posted:the totally bizarre doom series is an example of this because it goes place
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Apr 5, 2023 18:05
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Bungie/Microsoft owe the world to Eric Nylund for Halo: The Fall of Reach, which turned a bunch of story bible details that are never conveyed in the game itself into a fun, engaging sci-fi military story that makes Halo: Combat Evolved and the series overall much more interesting. I understand why the game has such a narrow storytelling focus, from both narrative and development angles, but it would have been nice to mention any of the backstory the book covered. (The game makes it clear that the Pillar of Autumn arrives at the Halo after fleeing a battle, but glosses over how the battle in question ended with the complete destruction of the last major human colony world.) Atop a pile of books in my bedroom right now is a Magic: The Gathering tie-in novel that I found in my apartment complex's trash area along with a big stack of "real" books, all in great condition. I never played MTG and don't really have any interest in it, but I keep holding onto this book for reasons I can't articulate. I'll pick it up and give it a shot one of these days. (Also in that pile: a well-worn, broken-spined copy of the Batman: Knightfall novelization that I rescued from a junk pile when a friend was cleaning out their place before moving.) Augustus Snodgrass posted:Didn't the Back to the Future novelization have a scene with a nuclear explosion because it was based on an earlier draft of the screenplay? One summer when I was a kid, my mom made me read the BttF III novelization before she would let me rent the movie from the library as a weird carrot-and-stick thing. The novelization contains a scene where Mad Dog Tannen kills Marshall Strickland - in front of his kid! - and gets away with it. It was a surprisingly heavy scene on the page, so I braced myself when I knew Tannen's gang was riding to town at the start of the third act...but the shooting never came. Years later via the DVD release I found out that it was in the script and had been filmed, but deleted from the final cut (Because, surprisingly, the whole "kid watches his father die" bit was a little too heavy for what's otherwise a fun, light adventure.) It's why the deputy shows up to arrest Tannen after Marty outsmarts him and not Strickland himself.
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Apr 5, 2023 18:20
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I don't play Magic the Gathering either, but I do keep up with the storyline for some reason, and I'll tell you: the short stories they publish on their website are loving awful. Total dogshit but I read them all.
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Apr 6, 2023 00:30
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disaster pastor posted:it was so incredibly terrible (Janeway's the new Borg queen! the Borg eat Pluto! the Enterprise crew mutinies against Picard so he doesn't sabotage negotiations with the Borg!) This came after the Voyager relaunch novels they attempted, right? I remember the first duology of those being so terrible that I stopped reading in the middle... the initial antagonist was an evil Starfleet admiral who had a literal sex fetish for the Borg, and there was an extended sequence where she's practically having an orgasm injecting herself with Borg nanites. I may have actually thrown the book at my bedroom wall. Evidently one of the people who wrote those Voyager novels is now a writer on Discovery and Picard. I've got substantial respect for making the jump from the tie-in novels to the real-deal TV series, but, uhhh... results not so good. These were a bit harder to turn up than I anticipated, but I remember there being a brief attempt at Men in Black tie-in novels in between the first two movies.   I read and enjoyed at least the one with the green slime on the cover during a SoCal vacation. I distinctly remember taking up a chair in the hotel lobby in Irvine for most of an afternoon so I could finish it. That Dean Wesley Smith guy co-wrote a bunch of Star Trek stuff too, not sure if he also crossed over into comics like Peter David did. These books were a bit weird because they basically retconned the end of the first movie and kept Agent K around, and there wasn't yet any indication that they were going to make a second movie. I wasn't a huge fan of the MIB cartoon, but I don't think these were supposed to have anything to do with it. edit: I guess I totally misremembered, Agent K was in the cartoon but not in these books. The books instead have the lady agent who gets recruited at the end of the first movie and then doesn't show up in the second. I kind of want to find these again! double edit: "When aliens check in, they check them out..." that's certainly a tagline that will grab your readers. Explains why sunglasses are such an important part of the outfit. istewart fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Apr 6, 2023 |
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Apr 6, 2023 02:27
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The Doom quadrilogy is perfect. We learn why the demons are invading Earth (one of the factions in a literary battle that has spanned centuries is repelled by our being able to conceptualize Death of the Author), who will betray humanity (every government and religious leader sans the Elders of the Mormons), and what to do if you're trapped in a simulation based on your own memories (use The Secret to misremember what happened so hard that you can befriend the various monsters from Doom (they finally find out what those holes on the back of the cacodemon are for: read the books)).
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Apr 6, 2023 05:10
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