Foster, Alan Dean, 1946-....

Alan Dean Foster was born November 18, 1946, in New York. Foster has degree in Political Science and a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema. His writing career began in 1968, with his first novel appearing in 1972. Foster received the Galaxy Award in 1979 and the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990. A collection of Foster materials and manuscripts is held by Special Collections, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Science fiction and fantasy writer.

Born in New York in 1946, Alan Dean Foster earned a Master of Fine Arts in Motion Pictures in 1969 from UCLA. His first short fiction piece was sold in 1968, and his first novel was published in 1972. Currently living in Prescott, Arizona, he writes science fiction and fantasy, and is the author of many novelizations of screenplays. He also writes non-fiction articles, film reviews, plays and screenplays.

Born in New York City in 1946, Alan Dean Foster was raised in Los Angeles. After receiving a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and a Master of Fine Arts in Motion Pictures from UCLA in 1968-1969, he spent two years as a copywriter for a small Studio City, California advertising company.

Foster's writing career began when August Derleth bought a long Lovecraftian letter of Foster's in 1968 and published it as a short story in his 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 published by Ballantine Books in 1972. It incorporates several suggestions made by John W. Campbell.

In addition to Derleth's Collector and Campbell's Analog, Foster's sometimes humorous, occasionally poignant, but always entertaining short fiction has appeared in most of the major science fiction magazines as well as in original anthologies and several Best of the Year collections. Two representative collections, With Friends Like These and Who Needs Enemies?, have been published by Del Rey books.

Much of Foster's longer work takes place within the framework of a future society known as the Universe of the Commonwealth wherein mankind has forged a close relationship with a race of insect-like creatures called the Thranx. Foster has also worked in the realm of fantasy, notably the six-volume Spellsinger series and the African-based contemporary horror novel Into the Out of . He is also the author of numerous film novelizations like Alien and Aliens, Outland, Clash of the Titans, The Black Hole, Star Wars, and The Thing . Among his other works are non-fiction articles, innumerable film reviews, talking records, radio plays and screenplays, and the treatment for the first Star Trek movie. Besides publication in English, his work has been translated into all major foreign languages and many minor ones, from Russian to Flemish to Hebrew.

Through restricted (for now) to the exploration of one world, Foster's love of the far-away and exotic has led him to travel extensively, including an early sojourn into French Polynesia, where he lived for a summer with a family of local gendarme, and a month in the back country of Tanzania. Besides traveling, he enjoys both classical and rock music, his favorites running the gamut from ZZ Top to Janacek. Other pastimes include basketball, hiking, body surfing, collecting animation on video, and weight lifting. He has taught screen writing, literature, and film history at UCLA and Los Angeles City College as well as having lectured at various schools around the country and in Europe. He is a member of the Science-Fiction Writers of America, West.

Foster and his wife JoAnn Oxley of Moran, Texas reside in Prescott in a house built of brick salvaged from a turn-of-the-century brothel.