Why Can't People Like Tie-In Fiction?

[Raven]

I'm not sure that's true. I can only speak for Doctor Who and I know that as a British television programme, they don't have a massive budget and have to count every single CGI shot, so lots of locations and effects are out of their budget, for example, for the first few series there was lots of discussion around why there were so few stories set on alien planets, and it was always down to budget. They've been very clever and tried to introduce more, but unless they can do almost all interior shots, the cost of generating a whole CGI location is too prohibitive, and the story in a book can do just that all in the readers mind.

 

US TV shows are still constrained in the same way. Although CGI is more widely used these days, it is still very expensive and we haven't got to the point - yet - of TV actors filming solely in front of green screen. So, for now, books can still take you places TV and film cannot, but that is changing.

 

Where books will continue to score over TV and film is being able to tell more involved and complex stories, especially in the tie-in market.

 

TV shows are usually constrained by a 45 or 90 minute time slot and films by a 2 to 3 hour running time which doesn't usually allow for the kind of depth a novel can give you. A tie-in novel in for a franchise should, on paper, allow for more complex plots, better characterisation and a more in-depth exploration of a subject than a TV show or film can hope to do, but in my experience most tie-in novels - though not all - have tended to go for big fan-pleasing ideas which are then poorly executed.

[Darrin Drader]

US TV shows are still constrained in the same way. Although CGI is more widely used these days, it is still very expensive and we haven't got to the point - yet - of TV actors filming solely in front of green screen. So, for now, books can still take you places TV and film cannot, but that is changing.

 

Sanctuary wasn't filmed entirely in front of a green screen, but a great deal of it was. Also, Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome (which hasn't aired yet) pretty much was.

 

Where books will continue to score over TV and film is being able to tell more involved and complex stories, especially in the tie-in market.

 

TV shows are usually constrained by a 45 or 90 minute time slot and films by a 2 to 3 hour running time which doesn't usually allow for the kind of depth a novel can give you. A tie-in novel in for a franchise should, on paper, allow for more complex plots, better characterisation and a more in-depth exploration of a subject than a TV show or film can hope to do, but in my experience most tie-in novels - though not all - have tended to go for big fan-pleasing ideas which are then poorly executed.

 

I suppose that it depends on what it's tying into. I've read my share of novels that tie into game settings (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance), and what they do is detail significant events in the worlds in which they're set. I think what tie-in fiction ultimately accomplishes has a lot to do with how good of care the people overseeing the IP are taking, and what the writer is trying to do with it. I know that one author that I follow has said that they treat them like historical novels that are set in a history other than our own.

 

Some are definitely better than others.

[Raven]

Sanctuary wasn't filmed entirely in front of a green screen, but a great deal of it was. Also, Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome (which hasn't aired yet) pretty much was.

 

Well, as I say, things are changing (looking at the trailer for the new series of Doctor Who it looks as though they have gone a bit mad with the CGI as well).

 

Part of me hopes TV will still be limited to what they can achieve with CGI, if for no other reason than I don't want to see TV turn into something that is pretty to look at but which is devoid of any actual substance (like the Star Wars prequels).

 

I suppose that it depends on what it's tying into. I've read my share of novels that tie into game settings (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance), and what they do is detail significant events in the worlds in which they're set. I think what tie-in fiction ultimately accomplishes has a lot to do with how good of care the people overseeing the IP are taking, and what the writer is trying to do with it. I know that one author that I follow has said that they treat them like historical novels that are set in a history other than our own.

 

My main experience is with Star Trek books, where after releasing a huge number of books over the years that were stand alone novels based on original ideas, Simon and Schuster(?) switched their publishing model to multi-novel sagas based on fan pleasing themes (The Dominion War, Iconian Gateways, Section 31 etc). For the casual reader like myself, these series were an immediate deterrent to continue reading but the crunch came for me after reading the first book of the Genesis Wave series (which was truly terrible) and The Captain's Daughter, which for a Peter David book was pretty poor. I have read a couple of others since, the first book in the Vanguard series for example, but by and large I've found them to be an unsatisfactory experience and after having similar issues with the Star Wars novels as well, I pretty much tend to give tie-ins a wide berth these days (the exception being the odd Doctor Who novel, which have always been a bit more original anyway).

 

Some are definitely better than others.

 

Quite.