Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

Starship Troopers (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein is another of those supposedly-classic science fiction novels I had never read, until now.  But I did see the 1997 movie, which was enough to make me think I wouldn't like the book. I was right, but not for the reasons I thought. The book isn't really an adventure story, but a history of the military indoctrination of a young man in the future. It's filled with info-dumps giving arguments about service and citizenship, all of which (if followed) would likely lead directly to fascism. The movie jettisoned all this, taking a snarky tone, and concentrating on the war with the completely inhuman aliens called merely Bugs. It probably was the right choice for making an almost palatable film, but reading the book makes one feel that Heinlein's views of society are as diabolically twisted as Ayn Rand's objectivism (a candy-coated term for selfishness). Why either book is popular is beyond me, but they are book ends on the same bookshelf. Not a shelf I want in my bookcases. 

The Director Should've Shot You by Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster has been a prolific author of original books as well as of novelizations of scripts. This book, The Director Should Have Shot You (2021),  concerns the latter, covering some twenty-seven projects from 1974 through 2017, many of them very high-profile franchises (e.g., Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, Alien, etc.). I'd previously understood that writers were the lowest person on the totem pole in Hollywood, but Foster's book makes abundantly clear that those writers who novelize scripts are the lowest of the low. Clearly I didn't have a cynical enough view of Hollywood before I read this book. Here's are some choice observations:

"Most of the folks working on large-scale films understand that they cannot set the lights, cannot build the sets, cannot do the special effects or sew the costumes or produce or direct or act or wrangle the dogs--but everybody thinks they can write." (p. 184)

"Nothing will get you eyed with greater suspicion in Hollywood than offering to do something for free." (p. 103)

"Given enough CGI action, a certain segment of the movie-going public will watch anything, no matter how little sense is made by the plot, characters, and dialogue." (p. 229)

"Of course, logic and reason never stopped a movie from getting made, so we continue to be threatened with an endless succession of mind-numbing Terminator films. Maybe that is the machines' real method of exterminating us: dulling out thought processes with increasingly stupid movies to the point where we are unable to mount an intelligent resistance." (p. 218)