Novelizations Bitch

This weekend I was talking about books with my friends and somehow we started talking about the Star Wars novels. As those of you who listen to Paperweights may know (so not many of you…), I am an English major and therefore am a giant snob when it comes to the fiction I read. So naturally I started to rip into the friend who owned them, telling them that their literary tastes were worse than people who read Twilight. At least that had the decency to be an original story… Right?

But later that night when I was getting ready for bed I couldn’t stop thinking about why I was such a bitch about those books. Why was I so stuck up when it came to novels of that kind? By that kind I mean novels based on über nerdy sagas, such as the books based on Halo, Magic the Gathering, Starcraft, or Star Trek. Don’t get me wrong, I love all of those games, movies and shows, but somehow the idea of reading a novel based on that stuff was too much for me. I just couldn’t get behind it. What the hell is my problem?

Maybe the reason those books are the bane of my existence are that they’re pretty much fan fictions that are published. After all, it’s not part of the real story. Or is it? The authors would have to get permission to use the characters and stuff, and if the owners of whatever series it was based on didn’t think that they were being true to the “real” story, they could just deny the use of their copyrighted material. In fact, I’m pretty sure that a lot of these books are commissioned by the makers of the original material to try and flesh out the story for more dedicated fans. So obviously this isn’t the case… So I can’t hate these books for being glorified fan fiction.

The next reason that pops into my mind for why these novels are skeezy is that realistically they’re just the creators of the series trying to rake in some more money. They assume that nerds will buy anything that has the name of their respective obsession on it, and just pump out some garbage to make a quick buck. This, however, might not be the case either. I tried to find out exactly how much the average Starcraft book makes compared to other memorabilia, without much success. I have a feeling that the reason I couldn’t find out how much money these books made is because they didn’t really make much at all. Granted I didn’t look very hard, since it is 1AM and I want to go to bed, but still. If they were fairly lucrative I assume that fact would be easy to find, would it not? Some of these books make a decent amount of money, that’s for sure. After all, the first Halo book sold over a million copies. I don’t think that is the general rule though. So if the profits from these are marginal than they must be labours of love, which makes me think that maybe I can’t hate them for the money they make either. Damn.

I think what it comes down to is that I’m just a fiction snob, and need to stop being so hard on the people who read and write these books. After all, I’ve never read one before, so who am I to be biased towards them? And as someone who occasionally writes short stories, I should understand how writing about something you know (whether it be a video game or your life experiences) is a lot easier than coming up with something “original”. I feel like we all know someone with a book like this lying around their house somewhere, and maybe (if you’re like me) we shouldn’t judge them because of it, and maybe open our minds to the possibility that they might be decent additions to the stories we already love. So on that note, I’m shopping around for a book that falls into this genre. If you have any suggestions send me an email.

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