Looking back over my earlier collection, I noticed that I have quite a few books published by Sphere in the UK. This is one of my favourites. This one was released in cinemas in the UK in the summer of 79, and my older brother took me to see it.
Like another TV show that was theatrically released in the UK (Battlestar Galactica*) this was created by Glen A. Larson, who was also behind several successful (and some not so successful!) TV shows in the 70s and 80s (amongst them: Knight Rider*, Automan*, The Fall Guy, Magnum P.I., Manimal, B.J. and The Bear). *I have novelisations of these...
The book was published by Sphere in 1979 (ISBN 0 7221 8116 7 - 95p). On the cover, there is a picture of Gil Gerard as William "Buck" Rogers, an Earth Defense Directorate Starfighter (the front obscured with the book name) with several other characters that look nothing like the actors that played them on screen!. The book is quite long for an adaptation of a 90 minute film, weighing in at 256 pages, but it reads well, with rich character background, good set descriptions and a plot that closely follows the story shown in theatres.
The story was split into two episodes (or the film was merged from two episodes, depending on how you look at it), "The Awakening", part 1 and 2 (starting a TV series that lasted for 2 seasons). It has Buck Rogers launched in a deep space probe, frozen for five hundred and four years, and waking up just in time to save the Earth from the treacherous Draconians. In the future, Earth is ruled by a Council of twelve computer brains, that looked like round tins with neon faces in them, that depend on "drones" to carry them around. People have grown used to having computers think for them. Buck, being from the past has more street smarts than the rest of society all rolled together, and saves the day.
Addison E. Steele (a pseudonym) also wrote a sequel "based on a teleplay by Bob Shayne" that, as far as I know was never filmed: Buck Rogers - That Man on Beta, also published by Sphere (ISBN 0 7221 8117 5), which had a adult themed story: Draconians wanted to start a new master race by mating a kidnapped Buck Rogers with select Draconian females. To escape, Rogers ends up getting the girls drunk, stealing their clothes and tricking the guards into thinking he was one of the females.
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