E.T. Universe

A botanist is left behind. His ship lifts off the California hillside without him because men with torches came up the fire road, and what is stranded in the suburbs is three million years old, very frightened, and slowly dying of Earth. A ten-year-old finds him at the bottom of the garden and does the only sensible thing available: hides him in the closet among the stuffed animals. William Kotzwinkle wrote the novelisation, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth, and then wrote the sequel nobody expected — E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, in which the botanist gets home, is demoted for interfering, and cannot stop thinking about a boy on a distant world. Around them sit the storybook editions and a small trail of fan writing. Kotzwinkle's prose is the surprise here: interior, melancholy, very funny about suburbia, and written largely from inside an alien head that finds human children the only comprehensible thing on the planet. Read the novelisation first even if you know the film by heart — it says several things the camera could not — and then The Green Planet, which is a much odder book about homesickness running in the other direction.