Alan Dean Foster
Born in New York City in 1946, Foster was raised in Los Angeles. After receiving a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema from UCLA (1968, 1969) he spent two years as a copywriter for a small Studio City, Calif. advertising and public relations firm.
His writing career began when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster's in 1968 and published it, much to Foster's surprise, as a short story in Derleth's bi-annual magazine The Arkham Collector. Sales of short fiction to other magazines followed. His first attempt at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was bought by Betty Ballantine and published by Ballantine Books in 1972. It incorporates a number of changes suggested by famed SF editor John W. Campbell.
Since then, Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in most of the major SF magazines as well as in original anthologies and several "Best of the Year" compendiums. Three representative collections, With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?, and The Metrognome have been published by Del Rey books.
Foster's work to date includes excursions into hard science fiction, fantasy, contemporary horror, detective, and western fiction. He has also written numerous non-fiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as having produced the novel versions of many films, including such well-known productions as Star Wars, the three Alien films, and Alien Nation. Other works include scripts for talking records, radio, and the treatment for the first Star Trek movie. In addition to publication in English, his work has appeared throughout the world. His novel Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first work of science fiction ever to do so.
Though restricted (for now) to the exploration of one world, Foster's love of the far-away and exotic has led him to travel extensively. After graduating from college he lived for a summer with the family of a Tahitian policeman, camping out in French Polynesia. He and his wife JoAnn Oxley, of Moran, Texas, have traveled to Europe and throughout Asia and the Pacific in addition to exploring the back roads of Tanzania and Kenya.
Foster has camped out in the "Green Hell" region of the Southeastern Peruvian jungle, photographing giant otters and army ants and pan-frying piranha (lots of small bones, tastes a lot like trout); professionally filmed feeding Great White Sharks in the Great Australian Bight, has ridden forty-foot whale sharks in the remote waters off Western Australia, and was one of three people on the first commercial air flight into Northern Australia's Bungle Bungle National Park. He has rappelled into New Mexico's fabled Lechugilla Cave, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi's Batoka Gorge, and driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia.
Besides traveling, he enjoys listening to both classical music and heavy metal. Other pastimes include basketball, hiking, body surfing, scuba diving, collecting animation on video, and weight lifting. He studied karate with Chuck Norris before Norris decided to give up teaching for acting. He has taught screen writing, literature, and film history at UCLA and Los Angeles City College as well as having lectured at universities around the country. A member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the Author's Guild of America, and the Writer's Guild of America, west, he also spent a year serving on the Planning and Zoning Commission of his home town of Prescott, Arizona. Foster's correspondence and manuscripts are in the Special Collection of the Hayden Library of Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, and he currently serves as Adjunct Faculty at Northern State University.
The Fosters reside in Prescott in a house built of brick salvaged from a turn-of-the-century miners' brothel, along with assorted dogs, cats, fish, several hundred house plants, visiting javelina, porcupines, eagles, red-tailed hawks, skunks, coyotes, cougars, and the ensorceled chair of the nefarious Dr. John Dee. He is presently at work on several new novels and film projects.
