Tank Girl was a comic by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. In 1995 I wrote the novelisation of the Tank Girl film, which means I was given the completed script, and paid to make it into a novel. There were various problems with this and by the time the contract was signed I only had five weeks to write the book.

I didn't like the film at all. It dwelled unnecessarily on Tank Girl's origins, and the finished character bore little resemblance to the Tank Girl of the comic book.

The film was set in a ruined world of the future, which was controlled by an industrial complex called Water and Power. None of this was at all original, and made the anarchic Tank Girl into little more than another Mad Max-type character. No doubt the scriptwriter was obliged to come up with this sort of thing by the film company.

Writing a Tank Girl novelisation was not how I would have most wanted to spend my time, but I needed the money, so I made it into a book as best as I could. I wrapped up the story of the film in a story of my own. In my novel, the tale that Tank Girl tells about Water and Power, and Kesslee, is the story of the film. Everything else, from the card game to Big Mary, from the Trader to the Post Apocalypse Biker Girls, is my own invention.

All in all, it works quite well as a novel. I admit it is not a great piece of literature, but it moves along fairly briskly and does give some idea of what Tank Girl was about, which is more than can be said for the film.

You can download the book here by clicking on the appropriate link for Mac or PC. Don't expect anything fancy, it's not going to arrive in your computer with nice graphics or anything. It's just the text, and it should download quite quickly. (These are compressed files.)

Tank Girl the Novel was originally published by Penguin.