Who is Number 2? The Prisoner tie-in novel)

David McDaniel’s Who is Number 2? was the second of the original novels based on The Prisoner TV series.

Like the first novel, Thomas M. Disch’s The Prisoner, it appears to take place some time after the events of the TV series.

You do need to be familiar with the television series. But if you are a fan of the TV series it’s worth reading and it’s recommended.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Thomas M. Disch's The Prisoner TV tie-in novel

The first of the original novels inspired by the hit 1967 television series The Prisoner, Thomas M. Disch's The Prisoner, begins with a definite sense of déjà vu. 

It's not quite faithful to the series but it is an interesting riff on the same theme and it's a wild crazy entertaining science fiction spy thriller. 

Lots of paranoia and weirdness.

My full review can be found here.

Murray Leinster's The Time Tunnel

Murray Leinster's The Time Tunnel is a 1966 TV tie-in novel based on the Irwin Allen television series of the same name that went to air from 1966 to 1967.

I have a soft spot for that television series. It's one of the more interesting time travel series. The novel is quite entertaining as well.

And Murray Leinster is a rather underrated science fiction writer. He certainly wrote some excellent short stories.

You can find my full review here.

The Blazing Affair - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Michael Avallone's The Blazing Affair was the second original novel based on the 1966-67 The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV series.

It's a competent spy thriller that is most likely to appeal to fans of the series.

It's yet another 60s spy story about yet another attempt to revive the Third Reich. It's set in South Africa so diamonds are of course also involved.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

The Cornish Pixie Affair - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Peter Leslie’s The Cornish Pixie Affair, published in 1967, was the fifth of the original novels based on the TV spy series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

It's a competent enough spy thriller which should satisfy fans of the television series. It has a somewhat more serious tone than the series. 

The travelling circus setting adds some interest. I always love circus settings.

You can find my full review here at Cult TV Lounge.

Rogue Planet by E.C. Tubb (Space: 1999 TV tie-in novel)

E.C. Tubb’s Rogue Planet, the ninth of the Space: 1999 TV tie-in novels, published in 1977. It is an original novel, not a novelisation of episodes from the TV series. It’s based on Year One of the TV series.

It captures the feel of the TV series extremely well.

Fans of the TV series will enjoy this one and it's a pretty decent science fiction novel in its own right.

My full review can be here at Cult TV Lounge.

Callan Uncovered

Callan Uncovered is a collection of all the Callan short stories written by James Mitchell. Mitchell was the creator and main scriptwriter for Callan, probably the most acclaimed TV spy series of all time. The book also includes a complete script for an episode that was never made plus a treatment for another unmade episode.

The stories are even more cynical than the television series (and the TV series is very cynical).

Callan worked better on the small screen but these stories are still well worth reading for spy fiction fans.

I've posted a full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Lost in Space by Dave van Arnam and Ron Archer

Lost in Space by Dave van Arnam and Ron Archer, published in 1967, is as its name suggests a TV tie-in novel inspired by the classic TV series.

And it's radically different from the TV version. Different in just about every way you could imagine.

It's not that it's a bad science fiction novel. It just isn't a Lost in Space novel.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

The Avengers - Dead Duck

Dead Duck is an original novel published in 1966 and based on the television series The Avengers. 

It was credited to Patrick Macnee although it seems to have been written by Peter Leslie (who wrote some very decent TV tie-in novels).

It’s an engagingly offbeat story with a fine crazy finale. It captures the feel of the series reasonably well. Fans of the TV series should enjoy this novel.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

TV tie-in novel - Mediterranean Caper (It Takes a Thief #2)

Published in 1969, Mediterranean Caper was the second TV tie-in novel based on the very successful 1968-1970 American TV spy series It Takes a Thief.

It was written by Gil Brewer, much better remembered as one of the great hardboiled/noir writers of the 1950s.

Mediterranean Caper is a lightweight but fun and breezy spy thriller. Entertaining, especially if you’re a fan of the TV show.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

UFO-1 Flesh Hunters (TV tie-in novel)

UFO-1 Flesh Hunters, written by John Burke under the name Robert Miall and published in 1970, was the first of two novelisations of Gerry Anderson’s excellent 1970 sci-fi TV series UFO. This was a novelisation rather than an original novel and was based on four episodes of the series.

I generally enjoy TV tie-in novels but I much prefer original novels based on a series rather than novelisations and this book is a good illustration of the reasons why.

The book is of some limited interest to fans of the TV series but it doesn't quite work.

Here's the link to my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (TV tie-novel)

John Theydon’s Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, published in 1967, was the first of three TV tie-novels based on  Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s legendary cult television series of the same name.

This novel is obviously going to appeal mostly to dedicated fans of the television series. But if you do fall into that category then you’ll find it to be a surprisingly competent and entertaining little adventure.

Here’s the link to my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

John Tiger's Mission: Impossible (TV tie-in novel)

Despite being immensely successful Mission: Impossible spawned only four TV tie-in novels (all of which were original stories rather than novelisations). The first was Mission: Impossible by John Tiger (a pseudonym used by Walter Wager). It was published in 1967.

This novel is based on the first season so the Impossible Missions Force is led by Dan Briggs (played on TV by Steven Hill).

It captures the atmosphere of the TV series more successfully than most TV tie-in novels. It’s fast-moving and the plot really does feel like a Mission: Impossible plot. It’s all very enjoyable and highly recommended.

Here's the link to my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Storm Over Rockall (Danger Man TV tie-in novel)

I’ve developed (as you may have noticed) a bit of an enthusiasm for hunting down the various tie-in novels that were produced to accompany television series back in the 60s. 

My latest find has been the third of the Danger Man tie-in novels, W. Howard Baker’s Storm Over Rockall (published in 1966). Which is pretty exciting given that Danger Man (or Secret Agent as it was known in the US) is in my view one of the best TV spy series of all time.

Here’s the link to my review of the novel at Cult TV Lounge.

The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV tie-in novel)

The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair by Simon Latter (published in 1967) is one of the five TV tie-in novels spawned by the 1966-67 television series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Like the other Girl from U.N.C.L.E. novels The Golden Boats of Taradata Affair has a much more serious tone than the TV series. And it involves pirates. Real pirates indirectly, and their piratical descendants directly. And on the whole it's fairly lightweight but it's not a bad little spy tale.

Here’s the link to my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

The Copenhagen Affair (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novel)

The Copenhagen Affair is an original novel by John Oram published in 1965 and based on the hit television spy series of the 1960s, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

John Oram Thomas (1906-1992) was a Welsh writer who wrote two Man From U.N.C.L.E. novels as John Oram. He also wrote a non-fiction history of the World War 2 Danish Resistance movement and in fact there are constant references to the war and to the Resistance in The Copenhagen Affair.

On a business trip to Copenhagen Mike Stanning meets a girl named Norah. They get quite friendly. In fact they get very friendly indeed.  And then Norah has an unfortunate accident, But before the accident she gives Mike a package, to be delivered to Alexander Waverley at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York. Mike also encounters Major Garbridge, and a rather unpleasant encounter it is.

The package contains film of flying saucers. But these are not flying saucers piloted by little green men. They are flying saucers piloted by T.H.R.U.S.H. agents. No-one knows why T.H.R.U.S.H. has suddenly become interested in flying saucers but what is certain is that it means trouble.

What Napoleon Solo and Illya Kurykin now have to do is to find out where these flying saucers are being manufactured (it’s pretty obviously in Denmark somewhere), what their purpose is and most importantly they have to destroy the secret factory. So it’s obviously a story of sabotage closely modelled on the exploits of the WW2 Resistance and Mr Solo and Mr Kuryakin get help from a number of ageing Resistance fighters.

The plot is serviceable enough although there are no great surprises. There’s enough action to keep things interesting.

Like the other Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Girl from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novels that I’ve read recently The Copenhagen Affair is a pleasant surprise. It’s a perfectly competent and quite enjoyable lightweight spy thriller and it captures the tone of the series pretty well. At least it captures the tone of the first season pretty well, when the TV series was still a semi-serious spy series.

The edition I have was published in the U.K. in 1993 by Boxtree Limited. It’s interesting that there was still enough of a market for Man from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novels to justify republishing them in the 90s.

The Copenhagen Affair is quite enjoyable. If you’re a fan of the TV series it’s definitely worth reading and it’s an enjoyable enough spy potboiler in its own right. Recommended.

Ian Kennedy Martin’s Regan and the Deal of the Century

The Sweeney, like so many of the classic television series of its era, spawned a series of TV tie-in novels. Regan and the Deal of the Century was the third of nine The Sweeney novels and was written by Ian Kennedy Martin, the creator of the TV series. It was published in 1976.

The novels were all original stories rather than novelisations of TV episodes.

And Regan and the Deal of the Century is intriguingly different to the series. It's a political thriller and it focuses entirely on Detective Inspector Jack Regan, with the other regular characters from the series playing no part whatever in the story.

My full review of the book can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

A for Andromeda

A for Andromeda is a novelisation of one of the most famous science fiction television series of all time, a series that gave Julie Christie her first big break. The seven-part serial was screened on the BBC in 1961. Tragically the BBC, in its infinite wisdom, later destroyed the entire series apart from one of the seven episodes. The follow-up series, The Andromeda Breakthrough (in which Susan Hampshire replaced Julie Christie), survives and was also novelised  (I’ll be reviewing it soon).

The A for Andromeda TV series was co-written by astronomer and science fiction author Sir Fred Hoyle and John Elliot. The novelisation was credited to Hoyle and Elliot. It was written by Elliot but the idea and the story were Hoyle’s.

The audio of the entire TV series does survive and the missing episodes have been reconstructed using the audio and production stills (of which there were hundreds) so it’s possible to get a reasonable idea of what it was like and how it compares to the novelisation.

A new British radio-telescope has just been commissioned. And they’ve discovered something rather interesting. And rather startling. It’s a signal, from the region of the Andromeda constellation. A signal that appears to have meaning. It may even be a message. A message that has taken two hundred years reach us.

Dr Fleming, who was the first to realise that the signal was an intelligible message, has figured what the message is. It’s a set of instructions. In fact it’s a design, for a super-computer. And the message also contains the data to run through this computer.

Oddly enough the super-computer, once built, seems extraordinarily interested in how the human body works, about our biochemistry, our DNA, all that sort of stuff. It seems to be interested in producing a design for something else. Something biological. This is all starting to worry Dr Fleming. The more he thinks about it the more sinister implications he sees.

This is a first contact story but an intriguingly unconventional one. There’s no actual contact with aliens. The alien planet is 200 light years away and this book assumes that faster-than-light travel, or communication, really is impossible. There’s no possibility of actual communication. The only contact is the message containing the design for a computer, for a biological something, and lots of data. The aliens are not going to be arriving in spaceships. The only aliens in the story are the ones created by humans, following the alien design. Those aliens have no means of contacting their home planet. And are they truly alien? Are they human-like alien creations or alien-like human creations or some kind of alien-human hybrid? Are they alive or are they machines, or are they biological machines?

The book addresses the political, social and existential consequences of this and of hybridisation but it also explores the personal and psychological consequences. There’s a certain “trapped between two cultures” element as far as the heroine (or villainess depending on your point of view) is concerned.

This was 1961, a time when computers still used punch cards, but the primitiveness of the computers doesn’t matter. The ideas of human-machine interfaces and human-machine hybrids, are as provocative and as relevant as ever. This is a tale that deals with concepts like artificial intelligence, post-humanism, the fuzzy boundaries between biological and machine life, what it means to be human, what our ultimate destiny might be and the problem of the extent to which there can be genuine communication, and more importantly genuine trust, between human and alien and human and machine. This is a story that is really not even slightly dated.

While Elliot may have written the book it’s probably fair to assume that most of the interesting hard science fictional ideas were Hoyle’s. This is classic high-concept big-ideas science fiction.

While this is hard science fiction it’s also to some extent a spy thriller. It’s set in the late 60s, in a world in which the West is threatened and anxious and Britain is little more than an American satellite state. It’s also a world in which gigantic corporate cartels wield immense power and one of these cartels is extremely interested in that message from Andromeda. The government and the military are also very interested in the products of that alien design and they’re possibly less trustworthy even than the aliens. They’re certainly far more stupid and short-sighted.

A for Andromeda is smart provocative science fiction. Highly recommended.

The Global Globules Affair (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novel)

The Global Globules Affair, written by Simon Latter and published in 1967, was one of five tie-in novels associated with the short-lived television series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. which aired on NBC in 1966-67.

Like the television series on which it’s based it’s a light-hearted and enjoyable mix of science fiction and spy thriller.

It’s basically harmless fun and if you’re a fan of the original television series it's worth a look. Here’s the link to my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Space 1999: Android Planet

Gerry Anderson’s 1975-77 science fiction television series Space: 1999 spawned quite a lot of spin-off merchandising. This included a whole series of novelisations, but more interestingly it also included five original novels.

One of these original novels was John Rankine’s Android Planet, which was originally published  in 1976 and it's a pretty decent science fiction tale.

Here’s the link to my full review of Android Planet at Cult TV Lounge.