GEORGE LUCAS IS NOT A NOVELIST AND OTHER REVELATIONS
I have loved this book cover since I was 12.
And it gets me to thinking about how I was impressed at the time that George Lucas wrote the novel version himself. One reason I remember this is because around the same time, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind came out, and I had the novel version of that, too.
And of course I’m thinking, “Wow, so they both made films out of their own novels.”
Did I mention I was 12?
Eventually I learned of the concept of ghostwriters. But I didn't put much thought into the Lucas/Spielberg novels until, thanks to the internet, I found out that the Star Wars novel was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster.
Which is wild because Star Wars is what got me into reading SF novels, and I read a lot of Foster’s SF books in the 80s. And the book that actually got me started with Foster was Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, which was written as a sequel to Star Wars EP 4 before The Empire Strikes Back came out. (Apparently Foster’s contract for the first book included a sequel regardless of how well the film did.)
Anyway, that explains why the Star Wars novel is actually pretty good as SF novels go, let alone novelizations of screenplays, which Foster has done a lot of in his career - I read pretty much all the ones he did in the 80s, as well as the ones he did for Star Trek: The Animated Series in the 70s.
As it turns out, the one big novelization project he didn't do at the time was Close Encounters - that was done by Leslie Elson Waller.
It’s interesting that someone made the decision in both cases to credit the books solely to the writer/directors of those films. I’m not aware that this was done previously (giving a film director sole credit for the ghostwritten novelization), and I don’t think it’s been done since. And I’ve no idea why it was done for those two specific films - maybe because they were massively successful films that also happened to be auteur-driven?
Whatever the reason was, it’s probably slightly dishonest, but Foster has said in interviews he didn’t mind Lucas getting the credit for the novel since the basic story and characters were his anyway. And ghostwriting is basically designed for the purpose of letting someone take credit for someone else’s work (or to keep a franchise going). And it’s not all that bad when the person taking credit did at least come up with the ideas and characters and the storyline.
I’ll take that over strange projects like, say, those tie-in novels for the TV show Castle (the one where the murder-mystery novelist helps a sexy lady cop solve cases). If you don’t know, part of the promotion for that show includes actual mystery novels ghostwritten under the name Richard Castle. He has his own Amazon page and everything.
It may be the first time a mystery series has been credited to a fictional TV character. Anyway, it annoys me. Of course I’m not a fan of the show, so I would say that. But who would want to read a book by someone who only exists in a TV show?
Then again, Franklin W Dixon and Caroline Keene - the authors of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, respectively - didn’t exist either. So who am I to be critical?
Ghostwritten,
This is dF
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