Have I missed a reference to Jennifer Crusie, who IIRC wrote a thesis on the structure of the ‘women’s romance novel’ and was so right in her deductions that she has since published a string of bestsellers? (misslaura may have been summarizing Crusie’s argument differently than I would). Crusie is currently co-writing books with a male writer of thrillers; they are intentionally trying to have both action and romance. I didn’t think the first one totally jelled, but their joint blog is a charming performance of contrary styles.

Not that I’m putting myself in his league, mind you.

Sent it to a SF publisher (why not, I thought) then realised it might be too ‘literary’ for that genre.

Still, would a ‘standard literary’ imprint (does that category even make any sense?) handle a near future novel dealing with violence, unrequited love, the nature of memory and the intersection of religion and technology?

I mean, there’s not a ray gun, spandex bodysuit or hyperintelligent alien overlord race in sight – so it can’t be ‘genre’, right?

I’ve had friends (working in IT too!) offer to proofread it because they ‘love sci fi’, but I haven’t wanted to. I know the sci fi they read – would they even get the references to Poe, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche? Let alone the religious ruminations…

And then I think even I’m caught up in genre snobbery myself…

BTW I haven’t read ‘The Road’ yet – how was it marketed? Literary or Sci Fi?

hyper-Evangelical post-apocalyptic/rapture dreck…

I’d (and I’d wager many CR readers would) gladly display a shelf of dog-eared and well-loved Harlequin paperbacks before allowing a single hardcover volume of LaHaye & Jenkins to touch my bookshelves.

Well, to write a “good” book, sure, but generally speaking I don’t think many F/SF books are actually imaginative.

Yes, of course they’re poor. I’m surprised that you’ve read novelizations by authors you admire; I didn’t realize anyone would be willing to put his or her real name on a film novelization.

One of the problems, of course, is what you point out: expanding a 2-hour film into a novel leaves it threadbare, and literal transcription of scenes designed for the screen onto the page leaves them flat. The reason there’s no corresponding problsm for film adaptations of novels is, I think, a consequence of the asymmetry I pointed out in my post: many books can be written for the price on one film, so books tend to be longer, and filmmakers can pick and choose among the best (or most popular) bits of literature for their inspiration. Good film adaptations of novels often take extensive liberties with the text; something like “No Country For Old Men” is exceptional in that it is a fairly faithful adaptation while still being quite a good film (significantly better than the book, IMO, although I do like McCarthy in general).

So why don’t novelizers (is that the right word?) take more liberties in their adaptations? Why not expand on the material in the film, riff on it, make it more complex and engaging in the specific ways that literature can be and that film cannot? Because, as I said in my first post, that’s not what they’re being paid to do. It’s not a function of the art form itself, but of where it is positioned in the industry. Nobody picks up a film novelization looking for a complex novel that uses the film as a jumping-off point; anyone who picks one of these books up wants a faithful retelling of the film, one that recaptures the feeling they had while watching it, or, in the case of readers who missed the film in the theater (and before the VCR), they want to imagine what it must have been like to watch the film. I remember that, as a boy, my brothers and I used to spend hours telling each other about movies we’d seen, scene-by-scene. Film novelizations are close to an oral art form in that way, I think: they are an attempt at pure narrative, a faithful retelling of a story the author had heard once.

I believe this. A mainstream novelist once told me of a friend whose publisher had proposed to her that she write a bestseller. Part of this process was that a certain number of sex scenes were identified in the early stages, and these were given to a professional writer of sex scenes to draft, as the nominal author was not expected to be capable of doing it right.

Those of you who don’t know her works may be interested in the bibliography at home.tiac.net/~cri/2001/austinbib.html.

Plus they keep writing scenes that were really good in the movie, but don’t work in a book.

A “good” book, on the other hand, lends itself to being read over and over, always yielding new satisfactions. The so-called classic canons in books and music got to be that way in many cases because teachers didn’t mind having to teach them over and over to their students.

I realize, however, that some very ambitious authors have lent a hand to genre fiction—for obvious economic reasons. It’s very possible that they can create something of value out of them. Look at, for example, The Name of the Rose.