Written down it lost a little impact, especially in some of the well-constructed action scenes. Reading it, I envisioned the actors in their roles, the score powerfully pushing through the action and run scenes, the beautiful, uncomfortable design of the ship and aliens. Since it's a novelization of an existing movie that's superior, it gets a three star rating for different reasons.įirst, the story most of us know and love is great written down. If this has been an original novel, and the movie came from it, then it would have been a five star easy. He also won the Ignotus Award (Spain) in 1994 and the Stannik Award (Russia) in 2000.

His novel Our Lady of the Machine won him the UPC Award (Spain) in 1993.

The book Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990. Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a bestselling novel based on the Star Wars movies, received the Galaxy Award in 1979. Other books include novelizations of science fiction movies and television shows such as Star Trek, The Black Hole, Starman, Star Wars, and the Alien movies. The Tar-Aiym Krang also marked the first appearance of Flinx, a young man with paranormal abilities, who reappears in other books, including Orphan Star, For Love of Mother-Not, and Flinx in Flux.įoster has also written The Damned series and the Spellsinger series, which includes The Hour of the Gate, The Moment of the Magician, The Paths of the Perambulator, and Son of Spellsinger, among others. Several other novels, including the Icerigger trilogy, are also set in the world of the Commonwealth. His first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, introduced the Humanx Commonwealth, a galactic alliance between humans and an insectlike race called Thranx.

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.įoster began his career as an author when a letter he sent to Arkham Collection was purchased by the editor and published in the magazine in 1968. 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. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California.

Alien by Alan Dean Foster