I have the first Land of the Giants novelizations, and I've always wondered what script Leinster had worked from, because at least 2 (it's been awhile since I read it) of the characters are skewed. Kurt Kazner's character was I believe, an actual military man suffering from burnout, not a con man. Mark, the smart, strong, very opinionated self-made millionaire became this whiny, milquetoast type.
Well, after having seen the pilot episode, Mark was pretty whiny in it, if not a milquetoast.
Leinster's Land Of The Giants wasn't so much a novelization as it was an alternate continuity. The same set-up & characters (more or less), but going off in a different way than the TV series.
The back cover (but not the actual story) says it's flight 705, but the episode it's 612.
The book mentions a "space warp" although the episode mentions a "solar disturbance zone".
In the book they are at the fringes of the atmosphere & above the clouds, in the episode you see a lightning bolt go down across the screen (implying higher clouds) & the noise levels seem higher than one would expect at the edge of space.
In the book the warp is black & nothing can be seen, in the show the warp is green with lighter spots.
In the book Mark is an astronomer taking a new lens to an observatory, in the show he's a millionaire going to the Bank Of England.
In the book Valerie wanders off & gets caught in a trap designed to look like a "little people"-sized house rather than stupidly entering such a blatantly obvious animal trap.
Valerie is taken to a shed with other captured animals, not a lab.
They rescue Marjorie, only survivor of the Anne, a previous vessel that disappeared.
They discover that the giants have a presser/tractor beam that is somehow the basis of their society & earn some respect when they show they can disrupt this device & could have caused even more destruction.
Nits
Leinster's need to repeat things.
Errrrrrrg...
There is no chapter 7 (at least not in my copy). Chapter 6 is extra long on the other hand.
The giants are firing objects with their presser beam to destroy the source of the radio signals (as radios are forbidden the giants don't realize the signal is being bounced off a nearby mountain peak). The presser operator accidentally pulls the control all the way back which turns the presser beam into a tractor beam & pulls tons of rock & debris into the device wiping it out.
You'd think the designers of that device would have included a fail-safe to avoid that sort of thing.
At the end it's mentioned that there are 7 of them.
8, Marjorie is now with them (unless she died in the missing chapter. ;-)