2008 books

[peteryoung]

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.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I also love the movie and have been curious about the stories. Ed Meskys remarked somewhere that Jones fought in the Pacific in WWII, and that the concept of two advanced civilizations fighting a war on a more primitive planet over the heads, as it were, of natives who had no stake in the war (i.e., Earth) was based on that experience. Thus "island" Earth.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

He goes into that quite well, the way natives on Polynesian islands in WWII would build airstrips without really knowing what they were for. It's certainly the whole idea behind the story, and it's expressed better in the book than the film.