SF Media Tie-Ins: A Brief History, Page 4

The 1960s produced a considerable number of media tie-ins, including movie novelizations and children's books based on TV series. SF novelist Murray Leinster wrote a 1960 novel based on the shortlived Men Into Space TV series. Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote two classic Star Trek episodes and later had some of his fiction adapted for television, novelized the 1961 underwater science fiction movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Keith Laumer, also a popular SF writer, was among many writers of paperback novels based on the UFO conspiracy series The Invaders. Thomas M. Disch, another SF writer, wrote the first novel based on the British series The Prisoner in 1969, creating a uniquely original novel that captured the spirit of the series in the way that the other two Prisoner tie-in novels by other writers failed to do. (One of those other writers had also written several Man From UNCLE novels. Ace published twenty-three Man From UNCLE novels in the 1960s, and some other non-SF series also had similar series of novels. Tempo, for instance, published nine Get Smart novels.) A small press started a new line of Prisoner novels with the 2005 novel The Prisoner's Dilemma, but further books have been slow to materialize.)

In the UK, the first Doctor Who book was published in 1964. It was not the last. Several hundred have followed. (See next page.)

Meanwhile, Whitman, a competitor of Grosset & Dunlap in the children's books market, produced a series of hardcover novels based on a variety of television series, including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Invaders, and Star Trek.

In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered. Despite initial critical and audience confusion and sometimes hostility, the movie quickly became known as a classic, and it was strongly influential on SF movies and television for a few years. (Then came Star Wars, and most media science fiction became action-adventure stuff again.) Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick worked on both the novel and the film at the same time, working the story out together, though inevitably there were some differences in the finished products. The novel's ending is clearer, for one. Though only one movie sequel followed, a number of tie-in books have appeared. Clarke wrote a series of sequels and also published The Lost Worlds of 2001, a collection of variant texts from early drafts of the story (some very different, others less so). Books on the making of the original film and the critical reaction to it have appeared, as has a book on the design art of 2010. As of 2001, there are probably a dozen 2001-related books, and considerably more (books on Kubrick, for instance) that discuss it in passing.

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