2008 books
41) Raymond F. Jones, This Island Earth, 1952
It's fair to say that Raymond Jones's This Island Earth - three linked stories first serialised in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949 and later fixed up as a novel - was to become completely outclassed by the movie, one of the most archetypal SF films of the 1950s (and it was also the first film to feature an interstellar war). The movie differs from the written version by completely changing the latter half of the story, making it narrower in scope but considerably more colourful in comparison. The novel's a respectable enough pulp adventure in its own right though not particularly groundbreaking or imaginative, and (more's the pity) doesn't contain the iconic Metalunan Mutant, a creature that was originally designed to appear in Ray Bradbury's It Came from Outer Space.
