Alan Dean Foster

Alan Dean Foster has spent more than half a century writing science fiction and fantasy. His catalog runs to over a hundred novels across original series, standalones, and the film novelizations that introduced many readers to Star Wars, Alien, and Star Trek. He was born in New York City in 1946, raised in Los Angeles, and studied filmmaking at UCLA before selling his first story in 1968. He lives in Prescott, Arizona with his wife JoAnn Oxley.

His own fiction centers on the Humanx Commonwealth, an interstellar alliance between humanity and the insectoid Thranx that he introduced in his 1972 debut, The Tar-Aiym Krang. The Pip and Flinx novels follow Philip Lynx, an empathic young man, and his minidrag companion Pip across more than a dozen books in that universe, alongside the Icerigger trilogy, the Founding of the Commonwealth trilogy, and standalones like Midworld, Cachalot, and Sentenced to Prism. Outside the Commonwealth he has written the eight-book Spellsinger series and the Damned trilogy.

Foster is also the writer many readers don't realize they've already read. He ghostwrote the original novelization of Star Wars in 1976, credited only to George Lucas, then followed it with Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first Star Wars sequel novel and the seed of what became the Expanded Universe. He later returned to the franchise with The Approaching Storm and the novelization of The Force Awakens. He also wrote the novelizations of the first three Alien films and Alien: Covenant, the story for the first Star Trek motion picture, the novelizations of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, and Transformers, Terminator, The Chronicles of Riddick, Outland, and Dark Star.

His work has been translated into more than fifty languages and recognized internationally. Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first science fiction novel ever to take that prize. Our Lady of the Machine won Spain's UPC Award in 1993. He took Spain's Ignotus Award in 1994 and Russia's Stannik Award in 2000. In 2008 the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers named him a Grand Master. Critics often point to his world-building. The alien biospheres he describes carry the detail of an actual naturalist, a habit fed by years of solo travel through Africa, the South Pacific, and South America.

In 2020 Foster went public over Disney's failure to pay royalties on his Star Wars and Alien novelizations after the Lucasfilm and Fox acquisitions, starting the #DisneyMustPay campaign that produced a settlement in 2021 and brought other affected writers along with him. He has kept publishing through it. The standalone Stuart appeared in 2024, Lost on Paradise is scheduled for late 2026, and Pomme Studios is adapting Midworld and other works for PC in an "Alan Dean Foster Presents" game series launching the same year.