Alan Dean Foster

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Alan Dean Foster (November 18, 1946, New York City) is a prolific American writer of science fiction and fantasy novels and movie novelizations. He currently resides in Prescott, Arizona with his wife.

He is best known for his science fiction novels set in the Humanx Commonwealth, an interstellar union of races including humankind and the insectoid Thranx. Many of these revolve around the character of Philip Lynx ("Flinx"), an empathic young man who must save the universe. Flinx's constant companion since childhood is a minidrag named Pip, a flying, empathic snake capable of spitting a highly corrosive and violently neurotoxic venom.

In the area of fantasy, his best-known work is the Spellsinger series, in which a young musician is summoned into a world populated by talking creatures where his music allows him to do real magic whose effects depends on the lyrics of the popular songs he sings (although with somewhat unpredictable results).

Many of Foster's works have a strong ecological element to them, often with an environmental twist. Often the villains in his stories experience their downfall because of a lack of respect for other alien races or seemingly innocuous bits of their surroundings. This can strongly be seen in such works as Midworld with a semi-sentient planet that is essentially one large rainforest and Cachalot an ocean world populated by sentient cetaceans. Foster usually devotes a large part of his novels on descriptions of strange environments of alien worlds and how the flora and fauna of these worlds exists together. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Sentenced to Prism where the protagonist finds himself trapped on a silicon-based world rather than the more common carbon-based.

Foster has been so prolific that he is often rumored to have been the ghostwriter on novels with which he had little direct involvement, such as the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture which was credited to (and actually written by) Gene Roddenberry. However, it has recently become known that he did co-write the original novelization of Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, which had been credited solely to George Lucas, and was responsible for the original story treatment for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Bibliography

Commonwealth novels

Novels featuring Pip and Flinx

Icerigger trilogy

  • Icerigger (1974), ISBN 0345238362
  • Mission to Moulokin (1979), ISBN 0345276760
  • The Deluge Drivers (1987), ISBN 0345333306

Founding of the Commonwealth

Media novelizations

Star Trek: The Animated Series

  • Star Trek Log One (1974), ISBN 0345240146
  • Star Trek Log Two (1974), ISBN 0345258126
  • Star Trek Log Three (1975), ISBN 0345242602
  • Star Trek Log Four (1975), ISBN 0345244354
  • Star Trek Log Five (1975), ISBN 0345333519
  • Star Trek Log Six (1976), ISBN 0345248551
  • Star Trek Log Seven (1976), ISBN 0345249658
  • Star Trek Log Eight (1976), ISBN 0345251415
  • Star Trek Log Nine (1977), ISBN 0345255577
  • Star Trek Log Ten (1978), ISBN 0345272129

Star Wars stories

The Damned trilogy

  • A Call to Arms (1991), ISBN 0345358554
  • The False Mirror (1992), ISBN 0345358562
  • The Spoils of War (1993), ISBN 0345358570

Spellsinger

Dinotopia

  • Dinotopia Lost (1996), ISBN 1570362793
  • The Hand of Dinotopia (1997), ISBN 157036396X

Journeys of the Catechist

  • Carnivores of Light and Darkness (1998), ISBN 0446521329
  • Into the Thinking Kingdoms (1999), ISBN 0446521361
  • A Triumph of Souls (2000), ISBN 044652218X

The Taken trilogy

  • Lost and Found (2004), ISBN 0345461258
  • The Light-Years Beneath My Feet (2005), ISBN 0345461282
  • The Candle of Distant Earth (2005), ISBN 0345461312

Story collections

  • With Friends Like These (1977), ISBN 0345257014
  • Who Needs Enemies? (1984), ISBN 0345316576
  • The Metrognome and Other Stories (1990), ISBN 0345363566
  • Montezuma Strip (1995), ISBN 0446602078
  • Mad Amos (1996), ISBN 0345393627
  • Impossible Places (2002), ISBN 0345450418

Other books

  • The Man Who Used the Universe (1983), ISBN 0446903531
  • The I Inside (1984), ISBN 0446320277
  • Slipt (1984), ISBN 0425070069
  • Into the Out Of (1986), ISBN 0446513377
  • Glory Lane (1987), ISBN 0441516645
  • Maori (1988), ISBN 0441519253
  • Outer Heat (1988), ISBN 0446352659
  • To the Vanishing Point (1988), ISBN 0446513385
  • Quozl (1989), ISBN 0441694543
  • Cyber Way (1990), ISBN 0441132456
  • Cat-a-lyst (1991), ISBN 0441646611
  • Codgerspace (1992), ISBN 0441718515
  • Greenthieves (1994), ISBN 0441001041
  • Life Form (1995), ISBN 0441002188
  • Design for Great-Day (with Eric Frank Russell) (1995), ISBN 031285501X
  • Jed the Dead (1997), ISBN 0441003990
  • Parallelities (1998), ISBN 0345424611
  • Interlopers (2001), ISBN 044100847X
  • Kingdoms of Light (2001), ISBN 0446526673
  • Primal Shadows (2001), ISBN 0312877714
  • The Mocking Program (2002), ISBN 0446527742

Unpublished

See also

External links

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