This interest is carried over to his writing, but with a twist: the new places encountered in his books are likely to be on another planet, and the people may belong to an alien race. Foster lives in Arizona with his wife, but he enjoys traveling because it gives him opportunities to meet new people and explore new places and cultures. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A.
Yes, they were an otter, a dandified rabbit, a turtle with tardis-like drawers in his carapace and an alcoholic owl, but it was glorious and fun and thrummed my chords nicely.Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California.
In 1985 Michael J Fox was a time-travelling guitarist and Jon-Tom was a dimension-hopping guitarist and I was lapping it all up.ĭespite the horrors of the world, the anxieties over duck-and-cover and Greenham Common and Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher, I was performing rock solos with a Marxist dragon against a horde of ravening insects, with my best buddies fighting by my side. So, when he wants to conjure a boat, he sings a chorus of Sloop John B by the Beach Boys, not realising that, although he’ll get the boat, he’ll spend the next few hours throwing up over the poopdeck because he sang the line ‘the first mate he got drunk’. Jon-Tom is a Spellsinger – he can create magic from music and song, just not very predictably. It turns out that Jon-Tom (for that is our hero’s new name) has not wasted all those hours casually strumming Smoke on the Water on a battered fender guitar whilst high on weed. Turns out, Clothahump was hoping to summon an Engineer who could defeat the Plated Folk (basically nazi insects) by destroying their citadel he just summoned the wrong kind of engineer. He can talk.Īll the animals in this new dimension can talk, including Mudge, the otter, who promptly stabs our hero in the first few minutes. Here’s the pitch: Jonathan Thomas Meriweather is a stoned sanitation engineer with aspirations of rock-god stardom, working in a mid-western university when he is sucked through a magical portal to another dimension by a wizard called Clothahump who’s also a turtle. I mean, the others are fun, don’t get me wrong, but the original trilogy is great. Technically there are eight of them, but the quality dips significantly after the first three. So, I thought I’d write about my love for the Spellsinger books. However, Disney are claiming they bought the copyright licences (enabling them to sell Foster’s books) but not the liability (meaning they won’t pay him for it).įoster has cancer and his wife is ill and he needs a little love and support right now.
Alan dean foster spe movie#
So, it turns out when Lucasfilm sold out to Disney, that included Foster’s movie adaptations. To call him prolific is a huge undersell, with more than 150 standalone novels, adaptations or anthologies to his name.
It would be akin to a contractor demanding to have his name on a Frank Lloyd Wright house.’ Not having may name on the cover didn’t bother me in the least.
‘Not at all,’ he said, ‘It was George’s story idea. Certainly, the concept was entirely George’s, and Foster shows an admirable humility when asked if it was annoying for someone else to get the credit for his work: He was ghostwriter of the original Star Wars novel, which was credited to George Lucas. He’s written numerous sci-fi and fantasy novels and got himself a reputation as a gun-for-hire in the movie novelisation game, with adaptations of the Aliens, Star Trek, Terminator and Star Wars franchises. If you don’t know who Alan Dean Foster is, it’s possible you know his writing anyway.