At a certain point I glanced up, only to see the audience staring at me. We Have Distances To Travel And Thoughts To Think. Set aside the failure to appreciate talent. No, she decided. Thus does Foster render the electronically translated discourse of the sentience-enhanced cetaceans that swim the oceanic world of Cachalot, to which all such species were transported centuries earlier by humans as a penance for nearly hunting them out of existence a few centuries earlier. He even sneaks the word “kaleidoscope” into the finale, in which the lads are scattered into the cosmos, presumably an acknowledgement of Ray Bradbury’s 1949 short story. There’s nothing especially mind-blowing about the resolution of the mystery, but the water-world of the title stirs the imagination, with its weird yet plausible indigenous species and its wary Terran sea mammals, tolerant of humans but as unable to forget their history as Jews are to forget the Holocaust. QUICK ADD. Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California. Indeed, considering what he had to work with, not bad. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. Refresh and try again. One of the epigrams to Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of The Black Hole was from Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” But the movie suggested otherwise. Foster’s novelization of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released as an ebook on December 18, with a hardcover edition to follow on January 5 (just in time for the holidays). Star Trek Log Seven Possibly my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series was the very last, “The Counter-Clock Incident,” scripted by Fred Bronson under the pseudonym “John Culver.” You may recall that it involves the Enterprise entering a sort of Opposite Day alternate universe in which space is white and the stars are black and people start out old and gradually turn into youths and then children and then babies and eventually, presumably, into fetuses and embryos. In the latter tome, recounting the wanderings of the title scout ship and its cosmically bored crew in search of habitable planets, Foster does an impressive job of getting across the perpetually daydreaming inner lives of Talby, Doolittle, Boiler and Pinback, and the slow-grinding effect of tedium and isolation on their psyches. Based on th… Fortunately the crew then passes through what appears to be the Pearly Gates, led by what appears to be an angel, after which their ship is excreted back out of a different black hole. Among the shows that played there were many rock acts, and from time to time one would be asked to work “The Pit,” that is, the orchestra pit, as a sort of unpaid security officer, ensuring that rabid fans didn’t try to get from the seats to the stage. Uhm… Okay. Imagine the speed if James T. Kirk was aboard. Among other notable aspects of the book, Leia gets slapped and knocked around in it to an eyebrow-raising degree, almost like a woman in a Mickey Spillane novel. In recognition of this august literary occasion, here are a few memorable tips of the massive Alan Dean Foster iceberg: The Tar-Aiym Krang There’s this Krang, see. A New Hope (Star Wars: Novelizations, #4), The Force Awakens (Star Wars: Novelizations, #7), The Moment of the Magician (Spellsinger, #4). by Alan Dean Foster. 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. With this particular show, however, there was a ramp which extended from the lip of the stage to the lip of the orchestra pit, so that Smith could go all the way down to interact with her adoring fans. To end his book, Foster had to use, you know, words—he couldn’t hide the story’s massive failure of imagination behind the fact it was presented in state-of-the-art special effects. He received a B.A. in 1969. The story is just a satirical variation on The Day the Earth Stood Still, but the portrait of alien bureaucracy makes for good comedy, as does Lawson’s unruffled flouting of the threats of the alien bigshots. It’s a sci-fi variation on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Benjamin Button” premise (more recently it was also amusingly treated in David Eagleman’s delightful Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives), and most adapters might simply accept the conceit as a bit of absurd but charming whimsy. But it does, at least arguably, do credit to Alan Dean Foster. The Phoenix New Times may earn a portion of sales from products & services purchased through links on our site from our affiliate partners. With the passage came peace, and time to contemplate…, Their thoughts spanned infinity, as did their finely spread substance, and they now had an eternity in which to contemplate the universe they had become…”. Reminiscent of “The Teacher” from the Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain” as well as the Krel technology in Forbidden Planet, the Krang is both a weapon and a musical instrument, and it’s operated by the brain of a user who lies under a transparent dome. The financial rewards, that is.”. I smiled politely up at her and listened until she wandered off toward the end of the song, and then… I went back to Alien. Get the most out of your experience with a personalized all-access pass to everything local on events, music, restaurants, news and more. “The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”, “Freedom is just chaos with better lighting”, “If you're crazy, there's two things you can do to make yourself feel better: One is to get yourself cured. Staff, Engaging with our readers is essential to Phoenix New Times's mission. Foster did get cover credit, however, for an original Star Wars sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, published by Del Rey in 1979. Design for Great-Day Lots of authors write novelizations of movies or TV shows. Now the floating human settlements of Cachalot have begun to disappear, along with all of their inhabitants, so a human scientist has been sent, along with her rather annoying daughter, to investigate. Even the computer graphics in the title sequence, which a teenage kid could probably generate on his or her phone nowadays, were pretty impressive, especially to the accompaniment of John Barry’s ominous music. But the human characters would have seemed like two-dimensional stick figures on Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, the story was routine, and there were those embarrassing comic-relief robots voiced by the unfortunate Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens. All us nerds flocked to this back in 1979, of course, because the special effects looked promising. It’s also the first of the many “Flinx and Pip” tales (first in order of publication, that is, not in story chronology), focusing on the empathically gifted “ethical thief” Philip Lynx, or Flinx, and his dragon-like little pal Pip, a winged “minidrag.” Flinx grew up on the planet Moth, so named because its Saturn-like rings, interrupted in the middle, resemble moth wings. It was, he explains, inspired by a Poul Anderson story about a spaceship that was fueled by beer. Sign Up ›. Time to kill a little more the parasite impatience, the germmm of boredom, beneath a fairr upper sky…To the where of sudden screaming and the realms of the vanished men, to therrre we go…”. Then they were through…and amazingly, still whole…They were themselves…and yet something strange and new…, They had been compressed, compacted, but had passed beyond and through with their selves still intact. We use cookies to collect and analyze information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customize content and advertisements. No, this Krang is a Tar-Aiym Krang. As Foster himself frankly notes in the preface to his 1990 collection The Metrognome and Other Stories, “The rewards are in novels. Foster decided to see (non-explicitly) if he could accelerate an interstellar craft by harnessing the power of the crew…well, getting it on. Read 444 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Yes, I sat there reading Foster’s novelization of Alien. This was considered hardship duty, because one was situated in a folding chair right in front of the amps, and would normally have mild hearing loss for a few days afterwards, especially if one was, like me, too imbecilic to wear earplugs. Dark Star Star Wars wasn’t the first movie for which Alan Dean Foster penned the novelization, however. It’s an enjoyable read, and it must have been tremendously satisfying for Foster to put his own spin on the work of a revered favorite, and to share a cover credit with him. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. This process kicks in on the Enterprise crew in a rather accelerated manner, allowing us the joy of hearing William Shatner turn his voice into an adolescent squeak. Near the top of the list of Alan Dean Foster’s claims to fame is as the author of Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, the very first Star Wars novelization. This tale follows Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, along with R2-D2 and C-3PO, to the very Dagobah-like planet of Mimban, where they encounter various aliens and vile Empire bureaucrats and a wise if shifty crone called Halla, all seeking the “Kaiburr Crystal,” which amplifies the possessor’s abilities with the Force. But this particular Krang isn’t just your run-of-the-mill Krang. And scattered throughout the novel are passages that bring the otherworldly or futuristic into focus so matter-of-factly that they seem like the essence of sci-fi: “Could he be a mechanism, a robot? It concerns a visitor, seemingly human, who arrives on a planet inhabited by six-limbed creatures at war with another planet. QUICK ADD. CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS: California Privacy Policy | California Collection Notice | Do Not Sell My Info. The Force Awakens (Star Wars… “Thrust” Alan Dean Foster isn’t thought of as a big producer of short stories. Welcome back. 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. A robot assigned to such a position would have displayed far more warmth and affection. Alan Dean Foster’s debut novel, from 1972, is also the introduction to his “Humanx Commonwealth” universe, a distant future as densely imagined as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, in which humans live in harmony with the praying-mantis-like Thranx, among other alien races, in a more or less benign interplanetary alliance. See if your friends have read any of Alan Dean Foster's books. Set aside the rudeness. Add to Wishlist. More striking still is the amount of sexual tension between Luke and Leia.

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