Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial | 1982 | William Kotzwinkle | Buy |
| 2 | Извънземното | 1982 | William Kotzwinkle | N/A |
| 3 | E. T. The Extra Terrestrial Storybook | 1982 | William Kotzwinkle | Buy |
| 4 | E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet | 1985 | William Kotzwinkle | Buy |
The 1982 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial novelization is the book most people associate with William Kotzwinkle outside literary circles, and it earned that association honestly. Steven Spielberg, already a fan of Kotzwinkle’s fiction, commissioned him to write the novelization personally and gave him the freedom to spend five months on it, which is unusually long for a film tie-in. The result sold over three million copies in its first three years and is consistently cited as one of the best film novelizations ever written, largely because Kotzwinkle filtered events through E.T.’s alien consciousness rather than simply transcribing the screenplay.
The storybook edition, also published in 1982, distills the story into a shorter illustrated format for younger readers. The follow-up novel, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet (1985), is an original story rather than an adaptation, imagining E.T.’s return home to his own planet and exploring his life there. It gave Kotzwinkle room to develop the alien world in ways the film never could, and while it is less well known than the novelization, it has its own fans among readers who wanted more of that voice.
The E.T. books represent an interesting case in Kotzwinkle’s career. He brought genuine literary craft to what could have been a purely commercial project, and the novelization remains readable as a standalone piece of science fiction even for readers who have never seen the film.