Author Alan Dean Foster talks to us about his connections to some of the most important sci-fi films of all time, including Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien and more.
With a career spanning over five decades, dozens of novels and many more short stories, Alan Dean Foster is one of the most prolific genre writers currently working. And whether he’s writing sci-fi or fantasy, novelisations of major films or personal storytelling, Foster’s work has always had a touch of the cinematic about it.
In one of his earliest published stories, a 1971 short called Why Johnny Can’t Speed, Foster imagines a near future in which drivers rumble onto freeways with guns strapped to their vehicles. Published two years before JG Ballard’s own auto-fetish dystopia, Crash (1973), or in cinema, the petrol-crazed nightmares of Death Race 2000 (1975) or Mad Max (1979), its descriptions of mayhem on America’s roads have a grit and cynicism that could have come straight out of those movies.
Foster was just 24 when the story appeared in Galaxy magazine; Foster’s career since has been long and productive, with his original novels interspersed with a number of novelisations based on genre films and TV shows: Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, and too many others to list.
Writer’s Bloch
Foster, it seems, was always destined to work in or around the film industry in some form. Although born in New York, he was raised in Los Angeles; his uncle was the producer Howie Horowitz, perhaps best known for his work on 77 Sunset Strip and the Adam West Batman series, which ran from 1966 to 1968. While he was a student at UCLA, Foster spent a year at his uncle Howie’s Bel Air house, meaning he could walk to university on foot rather than deal with the daily snarl of Los Angeles traffic.
Had events panned out differently, Foster may have joined his uncle in the film business. While he was a graduate student at UCLA, studying for an MA in screenwriting, Foster looked at the bulletin board in the theatre department. On it, there was a note from a would-be producer who needed a writer to work on a project with him. The producer was one Ronald Shusett, who years later would go on to co-write and produce Alien.
At the time, though, Shusett was a drama student, “sleeping on the couch in his mother’s den,” Foster recalls, “and trying to break in as a writer and producer.”
Shusett had secured the option on two short stories by the author Robert Bloch, best known today as the writer of Psycho, the 1959 novel adapted by Alfred Hitchcock. Shusett couldn’t offer Foster any money for his work, he said, but he’d at least receive a valuable industry credit if the projects ever made it to the screen.
Foster therefore adapted the stories into a pair of screenplays, one of which attracted the interest of ABC’s film division, which through the 1970s and 80s produced a string of popular TV movies. When ABC went to secure the movie rights, however, Bloch’s agents “wanted too much money,” Foster says, and the screenplays went unfilmed.
“Hollywood is full of these stories, of the picture that almost got made,” he says. “Had that happened, I would have had a very early entry into the film business.”
Another near miss came not long after. Foster wrote a two-part Star Trek story on spec and submitted it to Norway Corporation, Gene Roddenberry’s production company. A few weeks later, he received a letter: “We like your story very much,” it read. “Please submit for our fourth season.”
There was, however, no fourth season – Star Trek was cancelled in 1968 after 79 episodes.
Around the same time, Foster also wrote a two-episode story for his uncle’s Batman TV series that had a Hindu theme (Burt Ward’s Robin would, at one stage, have exclaimed, “Holy holy cow, Batman!”). The show ended in 1968 and Foster’s script was never used – perhaps, Foster suggests, because Uncle Howie “was afraid of nepotism.”
A new Commonwealth
It was as a writer of short stories that Foster first found success. A letter written as a pastiche of HP Lovecraft’s weird fiction, which he sent to writer and editor August Derleth, was published in Arkham Collector in 1971. “It was my first sale,” Foster says. “I got $50 for it. I thought about having the cheque framed, and then I thought, ‘No, I need the $50 for food.’”
A run of other short stories led to his debut novel, The Tar-Aiym Kang, published in 1972. A sci-fi adventure that tears along at an absorbing pace, it was the first in a sprawling universe of interconnected Humanx Commonwealth novels, which also includes Bloodhype (1973), Midworld (1975), Voyage To The City Of The Dead (1984) and Flinx Transcendent (2009). But as he was writing genre fiction at a prolific rate in the early 1970s, a phone call from noted editor Judy-Lynn del Rey at publisher Ballantine (which had already published Foster’s first three novels) would have a far-reaching impact on the author’s career.
The publisher, del Rey explained, had recently purchased the rights to an Italian fantasy adventure movie called Luana. Noting Foster’s MA in screenwriting, del Ray asked if he’d be interested in writing the novelisation. Figuring he had nothing to lose by saying yes, Foster simply said, “Sure, why not.”
Luana, Foster later learned when it was screened for him, was a pretty terrible pot-boiler inspired by Tarzan. Unimpressed, Foster ignored the film and instead wrote his own adventure inspired by its characteristically bodacious poster by Frank Frazetta. Foster’s work was so effective that a representative from Disney once rang Ballantine to enquire about adapting it into a movie.
It was the novelisation that led to around 35 others over the next 50 years, and it isn’t difficult to see why Foster has been asked to write so many of them. Where some writers might see novelisations as simply another bit of work-for-hire, Foster has always laced his books with personality and dry wit. In his work for the Alien franchise, he played up the films’ suspense, adding in snippets of backstory and burnishing each scene with the inner thoughts of its characters.
“I love doing this, because in many cases, the characters are not fully explored,” Foster tells us. “Not because the filmmakers wouldn’t like to do that, but because it’s a two hour film and not a 10 week mini-series on HBO… So I get to do that, and as long as I’m respectful of and consistent with the screenplay writer’s original intentions, they generally leave me alone.”
Too many stars
In a kind of literary chain reaction, Foster’s work on Luana led to a novelisation of John Carpenter’s sci-fi comedy debut, Dark Star in 1974, and ten Star Trek Log novels – based on the animated series then on television – which began that year. In them, Foster finally found home for the ideas he’d written in that unused Star Trek TV episode he’d written some six years earlier.
All of which led to Foster visiting the set of perhaps the most important genre film of the late 20th century. In 1975, Foster received another call from del Rey at Ballantine, who said the company had just acquired the book rights to something called Star Wars – some sort of sci-fi film from George Lucas, the chap who’d landed a hit with American Graffiti two years earlier.
His interest piqued, Foster was invited to a meeting with Lucas’s lawyer, who gave the author a draft of Star Wars’ screenplay. “You certainly couldn’t predict any potential box office from the absurdly ambitious script,” Foster later wrote in his superb memoir, The Director Should’ve Shot You. “I reckoned that given enough luck and a halfway decent critical review here and there, it might make a little money.”
That version also contained a detail that jumped out at Foster: its protagonist was named Luke Starkiller.
A few days later, Foster was invited to visit an anonymous-looking warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Parking up, the author noticed some odd bits of what looked like grey sculpture outside – huge sheets of plywood covered in blocks and pointy outcroppings. On closer inspection, the blocks were bits of plastic – guns, turrets and so forth – seemingly culled from model kits.
Foster went inside and discovered more activity. This was Industrial Light & Magic in its nascent form, with a small army of artists and craftspeople building spaceships for Star Wars’ dozens of effects shots. Foster then met John Dykstra, the pioneering VFX artist, who showed the author the computer-controlled camera system he’d devised for the film.
Read more: Star Wars | The ultimate poisoned chalice for film directors?
Later, Foster was introduced to George Lucas himself, who showed off, with boyish enthusiasm, some of the other models created for his sci-fi fantasy – including a spherical space station he called the Death Star – and some unfinished effects shots of TIE Fighters hurtling across the screen.
“He was insanely busy, of course,” Foster recalls, “but he wanted to show me some things, and he did.”
The two got on well, and so Foster decided to point out something he noticed in Lucas’s screenplay.
“I said, ‘George, I think you’ve got too many stars here. You’ve got Star Wars, the Death Star, Luke Starkiller. There may be too many uses of the word star.’ He kind of nodded, and we moved on.”
About two years later, Foster sat in a cinema and watched the finished movie. Luke Starkiller had, in the intervening period, been re-christened Luke Skywalker.
“Probably some other people made the same suggestion, or pointed out the same thing,” Foster concedes. “I have no idea what happened, but I can at least say that there’s an instance where I may have contributed in some small way to a good change in a film.”
Foster wasn’t credited on the cover of the resulting Star Wars novelisation (it was credited to Lucas), published in 1976, but his name did appear on his sequel novel – Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye, published in 1978. At one stage, that story, which followed Luke and Princess Leia on an adventure on the planet Circarpous V, might have been adapted for the screen as a low-budget Star Wars sequel. Instead, the first Star Wars was such a gigantic hit that he instead opted to create a sequel with a far broader scope – what became 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. All the same, Foster had written the first in a long run of Star Wars Expanded Universe spin-off novels.
To this day, Foster has a copy of his Star Wars novelisation, signed by several cast and crewmembers. It also has an inscription from Lucas: “To Alan – the best ghost a writer ever had.”
Into Darkness
In the wake of Star Wars’ success, the rest of Hollywood rushed to develop their own space sci-fi movies, and Foster again was connected to several of them. For Gene Roddenberry, he provided the original story treatment for 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with the final script being written by Harold Livingston. (Roddenberry wrote The Motion Picture’s novelisation himself. The result is oddly sex-obsessed.)
In the process, Foster’s work has exposed him to a few of the film industry’s eccentricities. There was the time when, tasked with writing the prose version of Alien, 20th Century Fox flatly refused to let him see what the title creature looked like. Years later, when Foster tried his best to lightly rework the novelisation of Alien 3 so that the characters of Newt and Hicks were kept in cryosleep throughout the story rather than killed off, producer Walter Hill wrote a letter to the author’s publisher telling him to change it back to how it was written in the script.
(For the full story of Alan Dean Foster’s Alien novelisations, do pick up a copy of Film Stories issue 54, available now.)
At times, Foster couldn’t resist pointing out scientific flaws he noticed in a screenplay. During the production of The Black Hole, Disney’s intended Star Wars rival released in 1979, Foster wrote “a list of 75 things that I thought should be corrected in post-production.” That list, he later discovered, had prompted a meeting at Disney’s headquarters, filled with “yelling and screaming.” Ultimately, none of the changes were made.
“Probably for a couple of reasons,” Foster says now. “First of all, if you admit you made a mistake, that’s the first thing you don’t do in a big studio production… The second thing is, if they admit to a mistake and make the change based on somebody else’s input, then technically, they have to get that person credit of some kind.”
Read more: Star Trek | Looking back at every season finale
The novelisations, however, often gave Foster a chance to fix some of the scientific liberties taken in the original movies. In his novelisation for the 2015 Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens, for example, Foster went to great lengths to explain just how a planet-sized super-weapon, capable of destroying multiple worlds at once, would actually work. (In a nod to Star Wars history, this weapon was named the Starkiller Base.)
“They always have to go bigger and bigger with sequels,” Foster says. “So you have this ultra-powerful weapon, the Starkiller Base, which destroys entire planets at a distance, in real time. There’s no time delay. So that’s one problem. The other problem is, if you had a weapon like the Starkiller firing, it would instantly fry everything on [its own] planet. It would probably blow the atmosphere off the planet and everything and everybody on it would die.”
Foster therefore did some extensive research into astrophysics and came up with a two-page explanation of how something as outlandish as a planet-sized weapon might work. “My goal was to write something where, if Neil deGrasse Tyson read it, he wouldn’t fall on the floor in hysterical laughter,” Foster says. “I think it’s one of the reasons people like my novelisations, because they can tell I care.”
In other instances, however, there were scientific mistakes that are too pivotal to a film’s plot to be fixable in his novelisation. Here, Foster’s mind goes to JJ Abrams’ 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness.
“Scotty has developed this thing that looks like an old-time Electrolux vacuum cleaner… it’s small enough to hold that will let you transport anywhere in the galaxy,” Foster recalls. “And all I’m thinking to myself as I’m reading this in the screenplay is, ‘Well, we don’t need Starfleet anymore. We can save some money building all those ships. We just go, poof poof, poof poof, and here we are.’ But that couldn’t be fixed, because it was an element in the screenplay that I couldn’t simply ignore, so I had to try and rationalise it as best I could.”
Sci-fi and ping pong
Away from his desk, Foster’s career has brought him into contact with some of the 20th century’s best-known writers and filmmakers. Almost casually, he describes playing ping-pong with Arthur C Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka (“He beat me two times out of three…”); bumping into artist HR Giger outside a private screening of Alien; sharing hamburgers with John Carpenter.
Much has changed in publishing since Alan Dean Foster began collecting golden age sci-fi novels when he was a teenager. The genre magazines in which he placed his earliest short stories are long gone; for writers working in fiction today, it’s harder than ever to make a living, he says. In his view, the industry’s divided between the young hopefuls just starting their careers and best-selling authors – with little else in the middle.
Editors, he adds, particularly in science fiction, are “looking for different things.”
“A lot of it is governed not by editorial decision, but by algorithms that are provided by Amazon and Barnes and Noble. From the standpoint of financials, it’s very difficult for many mid-range writers to make any kind of a living at it, because publishers either want books from newcomers that they can pay virtually nothing for so they’re not risking anything, or best-selling authors who they know are going to sell, even if the manuscript is terrible. For everybody else in between, it’s become very difficult.”
In a changing media landscape, however, Foster has simply kept on writing and moving with the times. Now aged 78 and living in Arizona, the author’s still working hard; he recently wrote a novelisation of a so-far unfilmed comedy romance screenplay, Stuart, and a novella, The Moaning Words – another homage to HP Lovecraft. He’s currently collaborating with Dan Curry, Emmy-winning visual effects supervisor on several Star Trek TV series, on a sci-fi project.
As Film Stories spoke to Foster from his office, filled with sci-fi literature, art, and an ornate didgeridoo, he’d just signed a contract with videogame developer Pomme, with the aim being to adapt as many of 14 of Foster’s books into interactive experiences; the first, Midworld, is currently in development.
“It’s funny how these things cycle and circulate,” Foster smiles. “I’m supposed to be retired. I don’t know what happened. That’s not how it normally works – I’m busier than ever. But that’s all right. They’ll find me in a grave with a phone in my hand, constantly beeping with calls that I can’t answer. But I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t working. I’d go crazy.”
Film Stories issue 54, with our feature on Alan Dean Foster’s Alien novelisations, is available to order now. You can read more about Foster’s huge body of work on his website.
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