The V Novels That Might Have Been Better Than The TV Show

By Dashiell Bennett, 8:00 AM on Tue Nov 3 2009, 4,293 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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We all remember the skin-tearing, blue-bolted awesomeness of the original V mini-series—and the not quite as awesome weekly series that followed—but do you also recall the effort to move V off your television and into the book world?

There was a brief time in my youth when I was very into the V universe. I wore out my VHS tapes of both the original miniseries and The Final Battle, and would have traded all my Transformers for a Hasbro-made shuttlecraft. Let's face it—Mike Donovan was pretty much the coolest guy on the planet. Except for maybe Ham Tyler. As the low-rent, one-season weekly series was stinking up the airwaves—it did quite poorly, of course, but the SyFy marathon is showing me that it was much better than I remembered—a set of V novels was filling up bookstores shelves, as well as my own.

Since the upcoming reboot does not look too promising to me (Seriously, the bottom of the ship is an HDTV? You're gonna stick with that?) I had to go into my old boxes of books and dig out the remaining copies that I could find from my V library. I never did get a complete set—there were 16 in all, many released after the show was canceled and the world had lost interest — but looking over the ones that survived my many moving vans was a fun trip down memory lane.