12 Essential Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Novelizations

Sci-fi and fantasy adaptations are all the rage in Hollywood (Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, now playing at a theater near you!), but for every SFF book that’s turned into a film, there’s a SFF film that has been turned into a book. What’s more, novelizations aren’t mere cash grabs—often, the writers working on novelizations are among the best in the business.
The novelization business might seem like a relic from an earlier, less-distracted age, but it is still booming, at least when it comes to genre films, fueled by the desire of fans to extend their experience with a deeper dive into their favorite universes. Case in point: Jason Fry, author of the forthcoming book-shaped version of The Last Jedi, consulted with writer/director Rian Johnson to expand the story on the page, to the point that the resulting book is billed as an “expanded edition” of the movie.
Adaptations can also be fascinating in where they differ from what’s onscreen.If you’ve read the first Star Wars novelization, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (originally titled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker and supposedly penned by George Lucas himself, though it was actually written by Alan Dean Foster), you know that 1976 novel deviates from the film in many ways, as it was written long before the movie was released. It’s an interesting opportunity to see how Lucas’ ideas developed as the film was finalized.
For those reasons, the novelizations of both the first and most recent Star Wars film are essential reading for fans. Here are other screen-to-page adaptations every fan of the films (of SFF reading in general) should pick up.

The Shape of Water, by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus
What sets The Shape of Water apart is that it’s less a novelization than a parallel project, written in conjunction with the film, and co-written by the film’s writer and director and novelist Daniel Kraus. Add in the fact that the story is inspired by and an homage to a totally different film (1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon), and you’ve got a multi-layered timeline of inspiration and novelization that’s timey-wimey enough to confuse Doctor Who. All that matters is that del Toro has crafted a fantastic story that gets a much deeper treatment in the written version, making it the perfect companion to a day at the movies.

Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Stover
The knock on novelizations in general—and the whole reason we were inspired to write up a list of examples worth reading—is the misguided notion that they’re little more than cynical marketing efforts delivering, at best, a workmanlike recreation of a film’s plot. Stover’s take on the final Star Wars prequel proves that, in the right hands, a novelization can be much more. The author of the textured and challenging Acts of Caine fantasy series goes above and beyond, somehow crafting a standalone story that is both a novelization of the final chapter of the much-maligned prequels and a book that stands alone as a well-written, surprising, near-mythic heroes tale. Some fans go as far as to argue you don’t even need to watch any of the prequels if you read Stover’s novel, which delivers the storyline of Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall with far more depth, nuance, and believability than Hayden Christensen’s pouting lips could ever hope to convey. If you need proof that a novelization can equal, or even better, a film, this is your best example.

Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov
Asimov’s adaptation of the 1966 sci-fi film was released half a year before the movie, and was written by, you know, Isaac Asimov, so people often assume the novel came first. But Asimov was hired to write an adaptation of the screenplay, and chose to approach the outlandish story with his usual scientific rigor—or as much scientific rigor as can be expected from a plot about a team of scientists onboard a submarine being shrunk down to microscopic size and injected into a human body. The end result is a narrative that’s much more plausible and intelligent than the film version, which completely ignores most of the truly fascinating possibilities of a story set in the alien worlds that exist within us all. This is another example of a novelization that is yards better than the film. We’re very happy such a respected author “sold out” and took the money.

The Star Trek Trilogy, by Vonda Mcintyre
Even though SFF novelizations often pull top-tier writers, it’s still not every day you find one penned by a Hugo winner—let alone three (though it has happened before). Mcintyre (who won sci-fi fandom’s top award for 1979’s Dreamsnake) is a long-time Trekkie, and even almost sold a script to Gene Roddenberry during the run of TOS, when she was attending college (she later reworked the script into the novel The Entropy Effect). She was tapped to write the tie-in novels for The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, and The Voyage Home, bringing a perfect balance of professional creativity and loving fandom to the project, adding in texture and details that any true fan will savor (and, in some cases, beefing up the plot with deleted scenes). Considering the way the three films work together to tell an overarching narrative about Spock’s death, rebirth, and reeducation, it’s lovely to have one writer stitching them together on the page. These three novels are well worth reading, no matter how many times you’ve seen the films.

Godzilla, by Greg Cox
Cox’s novelization of the most recent film incarnation of everyone’s favorite radioactive giant reptile was a legit bestseller, an unusual achievement for a novelization. While some of that is due to the enthusiasm of Godzilla devotees, some of it is also due to Cox himself, who’s been working in the novelization field for decades and has established a reputation for bringing quality and inventiveness to the category. Reading the novelization, Cox’s childhood love of the original Godzilla and the other monsters in Toho Studio’s classic 1950s and 1960s films comes shining through. It’s an ideal pairing of passion and commerce, producing a novelization a slice above.

Alien, by Alan Dean Foster
Foster is something of a Godfather in novelizations—a successful author in his own right, he also penned many of the best-regarded examples of the form. Included on that list is Foster’s take on Ridley Scott’s Alien—which is remarkable, since he wrote it in just a few weeks with only an unfinished screenplay to work with, and never even got to see the final effects for the Alien itself before finishing the book. Foster manages to shade in the characters with motivations and backstories not onscreen while maintaining the pacing and sense of dread that made the film an instant horror classic. The book is a master class in technically accomplished writing, as Foster uses the tools of his trade to translate the sparse details of a script into a lush, horrifyingly detailed haunted spaceship tale, populated by characters you’ll feel for.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chosen, by Nancy Holder
The fact that Buffy remains a force in the SFF world is evident in the fact that many of the tie-in novels written during its heyday are being reissued this year to celebrate the 15th anniversary of its ending—including Chosen, which renders the entire final season as a single, epic novel. Holder’s an old hand at tie-ins, and has worked in more TV and film universes than you can easily count, and she brings a comprehensiveness to this novel that elevates it above not only her own excellent work, but novelizations in general. She seeds in Slayer lore so skillfully, complete newbies will be experts by the end of the story, and many of the ideas that seemed confusing or slapdash on the screen (please explain Spike’s narrative arc throughout the season) work better on the page.

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
Not quite a novelization: Clarke co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Stanley Kubrick based on his short story The Sentinel, and wrote the novel version concurrently with the production. Despite this close collaboration, the film’s final edit wound up slightly different from the novel for a variety of reasons, making the novel must-read material. In fact, it’s a must-read novel for fans of sci-fi, whether you’ve seen the film or not—or even if you’ve seen it and didn’t much like it. The themes evident in the film—the spark of civilization, the perils of technology, the ultimate fate or doom of the human race—are explored in greater detail, and the “open the pod bay doors” sequence on the spacecraft with HAL is, if anything, even more tense and dreadful. This is a classic sci-fi novel that just happens to have been created to accompany a film.

The Abyss, by Orson Scott Card; Hook, by Terry Brooks; and Total Recall, by Piers Anthony
All three of these novelizations are out of print, which is a tragedy—they’re all by top-tier authors, and all are worth reading in their own way. Card was more of a collaborator with director James Cameron on The Abyss, as his character backstories and other materials were used by the actors to shape their performances; he also provides a detailed overview of the aliens that’s necessarily missing from the film. Brooks’ novelization of Hook not only offers emotional shading to the characters but offers up the sort of dark and implicitly violent details about the Lost Boys and Captain Hook that didn’t make it into Spielberg’s sappy family-friendly film. Finally, just the idea that Piers Anthony adapted a screenplay adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story is the kind of head-aching twist Dick himself might have imagined.
What’s the first SFF novelization you ever read?