Rich's Gulag

This is one of those books that's a cheat for me, since I've seen the movie it was based on several times. It's also one of those very few film novelizations that actually add to your enjoyment of the movie by explaining plot points and trivia that the movie didn't have the budget to go into in any depth. There's not much of the George Lucas everyone came to know in Star Wars in this book ... we're talking heavy dystopian fiction, not space opera fantasy. Ben Bova does an excellent job encapsulating the novel here, and it's a fast read.