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Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization
Based on the internationally-acclaimed sci-fi property Ghost in the Shell.
In a near future metropolis dominated by technology an elite task force named Section 9 are devoted to stopping the most dangerous criminals and extremists. Their leader is The Major: a special ops, one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid.
When a hacker emerges, whose singular goal is to wipe out Hanka Robotic’s advancements in cyber technology, Section 9 will face their greatest enemy yet.
In a near future metropolis dominated by technology an elite task force named Section 9 are devoted to stopping the most dangerous criminals and extremists. Their leader is The Major: a special ops, one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid.
When a hacker emerges, whose singular goal is to wipe out Hanka Robotic’s advancements in cyber technology, Section 9 will face their greatest enemy yet.
234 pages, Paperback
First published September 26, 2017
19 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
James Swallow
308 books1,088 followersJames Swallow is a New York Times, Sunday Times and Amazon #1 bestselling author and scriptwriter, a BAFTA nominee, a former journalist and the award-winning writer of over sixty-five books, along with scripts for video games, comics, radio and television.
DARK HORIZON, his latest stand-alone thriller, is out now from Mountain Leopard Press, and OUTLAW, the 6th action-packed Marc Dane novel, is published by Bonnier.
Along with the Marc Dane thrillers, his writing includes, the Sundowners steampunk Westerns and fiction from the worlds of Star Trek, Tom Clancy, 24, Warhammer 40000, Doctor Who, Deus Ex, Stargate, 2000AD and many more.
For information on new releases & more, sign up to the Readers’ Club here: www.bit.ly/JamesSwallow
Visit James's website at http://www.jswallow.com/ for more, including ROUGH AIR, a free eBook novella in the Marc Dane series.
You can also follow James on Bluesky at @jmswallow.bsky.social, Twitter at @jmswallow, Mastodon at @jmswallow@mstdn.social and jmswallow.tumblr.com at Tumblr.
DARK HORIZON, his latest stand-alone thriller, is out now from Mountain Leopard Press, and OUTLAW, the 6th action-packed Marc Dane novel, is published by Bonnier.
Along with the Marc Dane thrillers, his writing includes, the Sundowners steampunk Westerns and fiction from the worlds of Star Trek, Tom Clancy, 24, Warhammer 40000, Doctor Who, Deus Ex, Stargate, 2000AD and many more.
For information on new releases & more, sign up to the Readers’ Club here: www.bit.ly/JamesSwallow
Visit James's website at http://www.jswallow.com/ for more, including ROUGH AIR, a free eBook novella in the Marc Dane series.
You can also follow James on Bluesky at @jmswallow.bsky.social, Twitter at @jmswallow, Mastodon at @jmswallow@mstdn.social and jmswallow.tumblr.com at Tumblr.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
January 13, 2021
Really enjoyed the novelization! Very entertaining and loved the action scenes. Saw the movie first years ago but was curious about the full story and then learned of the anime.
October 16, 2021
Doesn’t quite capture the striking vibrancy of the world it is set in, but remains a decent read as far as movie tie-ins go. Would make for a reasonable inclusion in a hard sci-fi starter pack.
December 27, 2017
Took me forever to find a copy of this book at a bookstore, but when I finally did I plopped down for three hours and read it right through. Admittedly I did this because the $15 price-tag for this novelization is utterly absurd, but also because the book was really quite a lot of fun.
I pick novelizations, generally, that are of high action films. My main attraction to the genre of novelizations is that the authors have a duty to present the overwhelming physicality of film in written format, and to do so with excellence and thrill; it's a style of writing I have seen butchered to great failure in a number of novels, but with novelizations the quality ratio remains generally high and inspired.
It's no different here with Ghost in the Shell; the action, explicit and vivid scenery, and sci-fi tech devices are all written with great speed, fluency and excitement. Although GitS has lengthy origins in images (beginning as a manga, then the masterful '95 film, followed by various other manga/anime adaptations, and then finally this 2016 film the novel is based off of), there is still room for visualization of all of the elements which the story affords through written form, and it's great fun to let the mind construct and detail New Port City and all its cyberpunk craziness.
In terms of story, the '95 film remains far and away the top-tier, with this modern adaptation particularly ruining the ending unfortunately, but overall the stories are roughly alike and this provides an engaging narrative that satisfies enough on its own; but certainly, it is the scope of technology and existential idea which will prove the fuel for your attention.
It's good solid fun. The novelization is very light on the Japan locale of it all, opting instead to focus more on modern advertising and architecture rather than delve/settle into cultural specifics, and I'd say that's good reasoning in regards the book's (welcome and appreciated) lesser pages and tonal rhythm.
Worth reading for any cyberpunk dork. And yes, even if you've experience with prior GitS narratives, this one is worth checking out.
I pick novelizations, generally, that are of high action films. My main attraction to the genre of novelizations is that the authors have a duty to present the overwhelming physicality of film in written format, and to do so with excellence and thrill; it's a style of writing I have seen butchered to great failure in a number of novels, but with novelizations the quality ratio remains generally high and inspired.
It's no different here with Ghost in the Shell; the action, explicit and vivid scenery, and sci-fi tech devices are all written with great speed, fluency and excitement. Although GitS has lengthy origins in images (beginning as a manga, then the masterful '95 film, followed by various other manga/anime adaptations, and then finally this 2016 film the novel is based off of), there is still room for visualization of all of the elements which the story affords through written form, and it's great fun to let the mind construct and detail New Port City and all its cyberpunk craziness.
In terms of story, the '95 film remains far and away the top-tier, with this modern adaptation particularly ruining the ending unfortunately, but overall the stories are roughly alike and this provides an engaging narrative that satisfies enough on its own; but certainly, it is the scope of technology and existential idea which will prove the fuel for your attention.
It's good solid fun. The novelization is very light on the Japan locale of it all, opting instead to focus more on modern advertising and architecture rather than delve/settle into cultural specifics, and I'd say that's good reasoning in regards the book's (welcome and appreciated) lesser pages and tonal rhythm.
Worth reading for any cyberpunk dork. And yes, even if you've experience with prior GitS narratives, this one is worth checking out.
December 31, 2017
This book is great for anyone who thought the movie was just a bit too subtle. 🙄
I get that for novelizations, authors' hands probably are a bit tied for what they can do with the IP. It's unfortunate, then, that (for whatever reason) there's no new characterization or added scenes or anything that might have enhanced the movie.
However, just the way some scenes or transitions are written is SO CLUNKY (see highlights & notes for examples)-- surely the author's hands weren't tied to the point of having to explain every joke, innuendo, and insinuation as if the reader were an idiot or possibly a child. You know? SURELY the studio wasn't so up their own rump that they required the author to describe scenes from the movie exactly as they played out, even when it didn't make sense for a book to do so. The movie wasn't exactly refined gold, and even if it were, successful storytelling in a written vs film format are incredibly different.
It's a solid "okay" if I'm being generous, but the writing is just amateurish throughout and this telling does nothing to enhance the movie, which really could have used it (and was what I was hoping for in reading this
novelization -- more fool me).
I get that for novelizations, authors' hands probably are a bit tied for what they can do with the IP. It's unfortunate, then, that (for whatever reason) there's no new characterization or added scenes or anything that might have enhanced the movie.
However, just the way some scenes or transitions are written is SO CLUNKY (see highlights & notes for examples)-- surely the author's hands weren't tied to the point of having to explain every joke, innuendo, and insinuation as if the reader were an idiot or possibly a child. You know? SURELY the studio wasn't so up their own rump that they required the author to describe scenes from the movie exactly as they played out, even when it didn't make sense for a book to do so. The movie wasn't exactly refined gold, and even if it were, successful storytelling in a written vs film format are incredibly different.
It's a solid "okay" if I'm being generous, but the writing is just amateurish throughout and this telling does nothing to enhance the movie, which really could have used it (and was what I was hoping for in reading this
novelization -- more fool me).
June 20, 2021
Ghost in the Shell by James Shallow is a Novelization based on the 2017 film “Ghost in the Shell” a film based on a popular Japanese Comic/Anime. Imagine the near future. Imagine that instead of using a clunky keyboard and monitor to read this website, you could have this review downloaded directly into your brain. Imagine that the line between Man and Machine continues to blur until computer viruses infect living minds, and corporations and governments can reprogram people’s thoughts and personalities to suit their political agendas. Such is the Sci-fi cyberpunk style world of Ghost in the Shell.
Ghost in the Shell, tells the story of Major Motoko Kusanagi a woman turned into a cyborg super soldier and the members of Section 9, an elite unit of crime fighters who specialize in taking down the cyber-terrorists of the future, including ghost hackers – criminals who reprogram their victims into mindless slaves and destroy their very souls. While on the trail of one such cyber terrorist, the genius known only as Kuze who is bent on the total destruction of the Hanka Robotics Corporation, Kusanagi begins to suspect that her nemesis may be an intelligence born from the fabric of the Internet itself with no real existence in the physical world, and may also have a connection to her mysterious forgotten past.
James Shallow’s Movie adaptation contains enough detail and intrigue to make this more than just a casual read. It expands a lot that wasn’t in the movie, and has a lot of great action. Overall, Aside from that, yeah, this is a very close retelling of the 2017 film's events into paperback format. Some scenes have extra snippets of dialogue that would have likely been cut from the film for pacing that, again, film fans will appreciate for the added drops of lore they may present as well as building the sci-fi world of 2040 Japan more, if only by a margin... All-in-all it's a good read for any Ghost in the Shell fan!
Ghost in the Shell, tells the story of Major Motoko Kusanagi a woman turned into a cyborg super soldier and the members of Section 9, an elite unit of crime fighters who specialize in taking down the cyber-terrorists of the future, including ghost hackers – criminals who reprogram their victims into mindless slaves and destroy their very souls. While on the trail of one such cyber terrorist, the genius known only as Kuze who is bent on the total destruction of the Hanka Robotics Corporation, Kusanagi begins to suspect that her nemesis may be an intelligence born from the fabric of the Internet itself with no real existence in the physical world, and may also have a connection to her mysterious forgotten past.
James Shallow’s Movie adaptation contains enough detail and intrigue to make this more than just a casual read. It expands a lot that wasn’t in the movie, and has a lot of great action. Overall, Aside from that, yeah, this is a very close retelling of the 2017 film's events into paperback format. Some scenes have extra snippets of dialogue that would have likely been cut from the film for pacing that, again, film fans will appreciate for the added drops of lore they may present as well as building the sci-fi world of 2040 Japan more, if only by a margin... All-in-all it's a good read for any Ghost in the Shell fan!
October 23, 2021
Basically, it's just the film in writing. Which, if you're just wanting to read what happens in the film, then great, but personally i feel that this is just totally lazy on the part of the writer: or maybe this is all they were told to do by the rights holder???
The great thing about books, as opposed to film, is that you don't have to pay for the sets, the extra cameras, the costumes, etc.. In a book the writer is simply limited by their own imagination and language skills, whereas in a film the director/writers are totally and absolutely constrained by finite resources such as finances, but also logistics, cgi limitations, the human elements of everyone involved (remember the pandemic and the disruption that caused to films and tv shows?) and many other things besides. So to sit down and write a novel based upon a film, one would think a really good writer would have a fucking field day with it, but, with Ghost in the Shell, they didn't.
Like is say, maybe this was the brief, and when someone throws a bag of money in the direction of writers and tells them what they want writing i would imagine they'll get plenty of writers clamouring to take on such an easy task as this "novelisation" must have been.
At less than 2300 Kindle Loc points you're pushing it to label this as a novel anyway. At this length you're seriously riding the boundaries between novella and novel.
I suppose they didn't want to upset the film fans who only have attention spans of two hours.
So yeah, sadly, a total let down. There could have been so much more background and detail that could have really added to the story. A seriously wasted opportunity.
The great thing about books, as opposed to film, is that you don't have to pay for the sets, the extra cameras, the costumes, etc.. In a book the writer is simply limited by their own imagination and language skills, whereas in a film the director/writers are totally and absolutely constrained by finite resources such as finances, but also logistics, cgi limitations, the human elements of everyone involved (remember the pandemic and the disruption that caused to films and tv shows?) and many other things besides. So to sit down and write a novel based upon a film, one would think a really good writer would have a fucking field day with it, but, with Ghost in the Shell, they didn't.
Like is say, maybe this was the brief, and when someone throws a bag of money in the direction of writers and tells them what they want writing i would imagine they'll get plenty of writers clamouring to take on such an easy task as this "novelisation" must have been.
At less than 2300 Kindle Loc points you're pushing it to label this as a novel anyway. At this length you're seriously riding the boundaries between novella and novel.
I suppose they didn't want to upset the film fans who only have attention spans of two hours.
So yeah, sadly, a total let down. There could have been so much more background and detail that could have really added to the story. A seriously wasted opportunity.
February 10, 2019
Authors James Swallow and Abbie Bernstein bring us the novelization of the film Ghost in the Shell (Live Action). The Major is on a mission to bring the terrorist Kuze in. Kuze who has taken out the scientists of Hanka Robotics for reasons that are unclear at first but as the book comes to it's close we find out that the Major and Kuze where runaways who had been taken captive by Hanka and turned into prototypes for project 2571. Now as I began reading this book and I noticed that there are elements from the original 1995 anime film, and elements from the sequel film too as well as some from the Ghost in the Shell series Stand Alone Complex's second season. It is an interesting story about the Majors back story prior to being in her shell and I do recommend this to those who like cyberpunk and the Ghost in the Shell series overall.
July 22, 2023
Wow, this book is only $1.25 from the "dollar" store, how can THAT be! :D
-_-
So, I have not watched the movie, but if this is accurate... eugh. It's like Japanese RoboCop, but for some reason all the other characters are the same but they renamed him Akira Midorikawa (although they address this at the end).
Yeah, I don't know...
Friend: "I have seen the movie several times and enjoyed it each time!"
Me: Yeah, well, I'm sure it's a blast to watch. To READ? Meh. Steamboy was the same way.
-_-
So, I have not watched the movie, but if this is accurate... eugh. It's like Japanese RoboCop, but for some reason all the other characters are the same but they renamed him Akira Midorikawa (although they address this at the end).
Yeah, I don't know...
Friend: "I have seen the movie several times and enjoyed it each time!"
Me: Yeah, well, I'm sure it's a blast to watch. To READ? Meh. Steamboy was the same way.
August 24, 2020
I liked both the Anime and the movie very much, hence I found the book enjoyable. The book follows the movie very closely and reads more like a plot instead of a novel. I am not sure if the book would stand on its own due to the writing being simplified. Long story short, if you liked the movie the book is a good read.
February 11, 2023
2.5 stars. Like the novelization of Empire Strikes Back that I recently read, Ghost in the Shell didn’t really add anything to the movie as some novelizations do. I’ve read books by James Swallow before, and like his other work the writing itself is solid.
Overall this book, on its own merits, is a perfectly decent cyberpunk thriller that managed to stick the landing.
Overall this book, on its own merits, is a perfectly decent cyberpunk thriller that managed to stick the landing.
Read
April 5, 2023Although I haven't watched the (live-action) movie, I felt this was a solid alternative. The storyline is intriguing and the descriptions are painted vividly. In many ways I preferred the slow pacing of a novel, instead of a movie as it's easy for me to get lost in the quickened action packed scenes instead of the wider plotline.
March 17, 2025
I got about half way through before bailing.
I don't often give up books, but this one seems pointless. Nothing wrong with the writing or the plot, but the Flims (I'm including the original Japanese one) were so visual that the written word doesn't do them much justice.
If I wanted a written version, I'd have preferred just reading the screenplay rather than the novelisation.
I don't often give up books, but this one seems pointless. Nothing wrong with the writing or the plot, but the Flims (I'm including the original Japanese one) were so visual that the written word doesn't do them much justice.
If I wanted a written version, I'd have preferred just reading the screenplay rather than the novelisation.
July 5, 2020
A short read but very entertaining, I saw the movie ages ago but I read the book just because I felt Luke it, made me excited to watch the movie again.
The only issue I have with it is that you can occasionally see where the writers have become lazy.
The only issue I have with it is that you can occasionally see where the writers have become lazy.
February 8, 2024
Was hoping for a bit more detail and insight into some scenes and characters but the book follows the film to a second. There is 2-3 moments where it added a bit extra on top of what we saw in the movie but that’s pretty much it.
January 6, 2018
Read it in 2 hours. I love the GItS franchise, but the movie disappointed. Thought the book would add something and it did a little bit, but not a lot. The editing was shotty at spots as well.
March 27, 2018
This wasn’t for me. It was a bit of a rip off of IRobot in a few ways. Maybe the movie would be better...
July 28, 2018
Al tratarse de la novelización de la película, lo único que puedo decir es que, efectivamente, es como la película.
June 15, 2022
"When we see our uniqueness as a virtue, only then will we find peace."
March 24, 2024
Highly recommended sleep aid
November 3, 2024
I realize this is a novelization of a mediocre adaptation of a Japanese manga but it was enjoyable.
February 17, 2025
Really enjoyed this! The writing is great
April 15, 2023
I was quite interested in this book as I liked the idea behind it and the questions it raised about AI and what becomes to the human when it is mostly a machine. It did have a lot of dramatics in it, but I think it could've been fleshed out a bit more towards the end. It was quite solid until maybe 2/3s of the way in, then it kind of came apart a little bit for me. I did find it interesting at points, and I like Major as a character. As it is a movie novelization, it isn't great in the literary sense, but I think those that liked the film and manga might like this one
See a full review here
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See a full review here
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October 24, 2018
Interesting story - human brain, mechanical body programmed as a crime fighter, who discovers her past and that the biggest crime of her creation.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews