Fairy Tale Spotlight: Land of the Giants (Book Review)

"Land of the Giants" is a novel written by Murray Leinster. It was published in 1968 by Pyramid Books. I'll explain why I mentioned the publishers in a minute. The story was the telling of the pilot episode for the TV show of the same name. (But not really.)

First of all, I want to say that the story of this book is good. I did enjoy it's telling. It is a complete telling of the initial journey from earth to the Land of the Giants from the TV show. However, the writer here absolutely does his own thing. He tells his own story the way he wants to tell it, so it doesn't match up hardly at all with the pilot episode. So if you read this, don't expect any connection with the show at all. Just don't.

The story is about the Spindrift, a ship that was going from USA to London. It hits some sort of space warp that sends them light years away to a world where everything is giant. The crew and passengers must then find ways to survive in a world that is actually surprisingly hostile towards them. The giants don't seem to be good people, but the writer chocks this up to them being a little too much like man. This is a cynical viewpoint and not necessarily the way it was presented in the show.

In the TV show, the ship gets stranded and in need of repairs, but in this book, it is fully capable of flying and pretty much stays in the air for most of the story. This was an unusual departure from the show. They were well within their ability to just leave if things got too hot. It also rather prevented them from having very many interactions with the giants, which was a disappointment honestly.

Steve, the captain of the ship, is still presented as a brilliant hero type, but he spends most of his time raging against both his situation and the people he has to survive with. He sees them as stupid and silly, where he seems to have the only level head among them. Although this may be true of the TV show, it doesn't always feel like that. In truth, he often seemed to me to be a tortured man who cared about everyone. Either way, he was a supremely heroic individual, and the author did get that right.

The other characters were... fine. I mean... there could have been better representation. The cowardly and lazy Fitzhugh was there and being himself, but there just wasn't as much of him as I would like. Also he was missing his case full of money that was rather integral to his introduction to the series. His entire backstory was apparently changed for the book. The TV version of him was better.

I should also say that they rescued a girl that wasn't even a character in the show. That was weird. I kept thinking she was going to get kidnapped or leave or something... but she was just there. This is another reason why I think the author was just ignoring the show entirely.

That's all I really wanna say about the story. I have to address some really terrible things about this book that boggle my mind. Let's get cracking!

For one, this book is terribly edited. There are sometimes multiple spaces between words. The author constantly forgets the name of the dog Chipper and occasionally refers to him as Skipper. Chapter Seven is just... missing! That's right! There's no Chapter Seven. Nothing is skipped, but the chapter numbering was just messed up. Also this is the most redundant author I have ever read.

Murray Leinster does not seem to know when to stop saying something. He states and restates things constantly to the point of absurdity. I've heard people actually talk like this in conversation. Even I have done it. It usually happens when you aren't sure if the person you are talking to actually understands what you mean, so you keep rehashing and restating things over and over until they firmly acknowledge you. Perhaps this is reasonable in conversation, but in a narrative it is extremely annoying.

It got so bad that I was able to begin predicting it. When something new was mentioned, I would wait for someone to talk about it, then another person mention it, and then it would just get restated in narration again, sometimes twice in the same paragraph! If these redundancies were filtered out, the book would have been so much shorter. I don't know if it was just a way for the author to pad out the story or if he is just bad at writing.

Pyramid Books really should have gotten their act together when they published this. I blame them more than the author because this book was actually a second printing. I cannot even imagine the disaster that the first printing must have been. Both came out in the same year too. I think perhaps that something just went wrong and they just could not fix whatever the problems were. What we have left with is a very strange interpretation of the show filled with errors and bad writing.

Now, I did say I liked the story. That is true. But do I like the book? No. I really don't. It is more of a novelty as a badly published adaptation than something that I actually enjoyed. I don't recommend it at all. I have just never seen a book in such bad written condition as this. It was honestly kind of fun writing a blog just to bash it. At the end of the day, that was the whole point of getting to the end of it, I guess. Some books just have it coming.

This blog was written on October 25, 2023.

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