Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Last Starfighter [Book Review]

"The Last Starfighter" is a novel written by Alan Dean Foster. It was published in 1984 which is the same year as the movie. This is a promotional novelization of the film. Yeah, I read a lot of those.

If you've seen the movie then great! It is, at least in my own opinion, one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's all about a guy named Alex Rogan who got really good at a surprisingly advanced video game at his trailer park. What he didn't know was that this game was actually a training simulator for the real thing. Aliens in outer space were in a real space battle, and Alex had just been recruited to be one of their best. It's got all the makings of a wonderful story.

But how does the novelization stack up? Well, Alan was definitely a reasonable choice for an adaptation. The whole setup for this story is very similar to Foster's "Spellsinger" series, which also had a normal guy thrust into a crazy situation. But the one problem with that series was that it was a bit overwritten. As it happens, so is this one.

It's not a bad story. I would even say that it is a great way to experience the story in literary form. However, every single milestone of this story tends to move in loops. One of the issues of the story is that Alex cannot decide if he wants to be just a normal guy on Earth or a starfighter for an alien race. In this movie, this conversation proceeds quite well and naturally. But in the book, everything is extended much more than it should be. It makes Alex's reluctance come across as annoying. Every scene is pretty much like this. If you enjoyed a scene from the movie, expect it to be triple length in the book. Not good.

That said, it isn't all that bad either. At it's base, this is actually a great way to get into the heads of all the characters. Alan does not just translate a script; he makes sure you know exactly what is going on. From that perspective, the book is actually a good choice. I was pretty divided on this.

The whole reason I wanted to read this book was because my friends pretty much said it was one of his best novelizations. It was a long time since I heard this, but I never forgot. But for me, it was right down the line between good and bad.

For the above reasons, I am sort of going to just recommend both the movie and the book as one unit. I think they both bring something to the table. Although, if you only had to do one, just watch the movie. It's still out there and available. "The Last Starfighter" may have bombed when it came out, but that doesn't make it any less of a great film.

This blog was written on July 4, 2025.

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