Alan Dean Foster

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Dean Foster, born on the 18th of November 1946, is the kind of writer whose name you might not immediately recognize, but whose words you have almost certainly encountered. He ghostwrote the original novelization of Star Wars, published under George Lucas's name alone. He wrote the Alien novelization without ever being allowed to see H.R. Giger's design for the creature. He crafted a Star Wars follow-up novel intended as a low-budget fallback sequel, just in case the film flopped. And decades into his career, he found himself in a royalty dispute with The Walt Disney Company over e-book sales. Foster's output spans more than 20 standalone novels, several book series, and an extraordinary breadth of film novelizations. How does a writer spend decades shaping some of the most beloved science fiction franchises in history, often without his name on the cover? And what happens when the corporation that owns your work decides it no longer owes you royalties?

• 2. Ghost Behind Star Wars

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  When Star Wars arrived in 1976 as a novel, the cover read George Lucas. Foster was the actual author, hired as a ghostwriter to expand Lucas's story into prose. When asked whether it stung to watch Lucas receive all the credit, Foster gave a remarkably grounded answer. He compared his role to that of a contractor building a Frank Lloyd Wright house, saying it would be absurd for the contractor to demand his name on the building. It was Lucas's idea; Foster was there to execute and expand it.

  The arrangement produced more than just the novelization. Foster also wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye, published in 1978 with a specific commercial purpose in mind. If Star Wars underperformed at the box office, the novel was designed to be adapted into a low-budget sequel. It drew heavily on concepts Lucas had explored and then discarded in early drafts of the first film. Of course, Star Wars was not a modest success. It was a blockbusting one, and by 1980 The Empire Strikes Back was in development instead.

  Foster eventually returned to the franchise for The Approaching Storm in 2002, set in the prequel era, and then again for the novelization of The Force Awakens in 2015. His connection to Star Wars spanned nearly four decades, beginning in relative anonymity and continuing long after his ghostwriting role became widely known.

• 3. Writing What He Couldn't See

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  The Alien novelization, published in 1979, came with an unusual constraint. Foster was not permitted to view H.R. Giger's design for the creature at the center of the film. Faced with that restriction, he resorted to deliberately vague language, describing the alien as "something man-shaped but definitely not a man." The circumspection worked. The adaptation has been described as a classic of the novelization form, called "almost as timeless as the movie" itself.

  Foster went on to write novelizations of Aliens and Alien 3, all three of which were eventually collected in a single omnibus volume. The Alien 3 experience was not entirely smooth. Foster attempted to preserve the lives of two characters who die in the screenplay, but the film's producers overruled him. That intervention led Foster to decline the novelization of Alien: Resurrection, the next installment. He did return to the franchise later, novelizing Alien: Covenant in 2017 and writing an additional spin-off, Alien: Covenant - Origins, in the same year.

• 4. A Universe of Star Trek

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  Foster's relationship with Star Trek is one of the most sustained and varied in franchise publishing history. His work began with the animated series, for which he produced 10 books. The first six each contained three linked novella-length episode adaptations. The final four expanded single episodes into longer stories that then branched into original material.

  In the mid-1970s, he also wrote original Star Trek stories for audio story records released under the Peter Pan label. Then came a more significant credit: Foster holds the story credit for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, having written a treatment built on a two-page outline by Gene Roddenberry.

  Foster did not return to Star Trek novels for more than 30 years. When he came back, it was to novelize the 2009 film Star Trek and then its sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, published in 2013. His bibliography for the franchise covers animated television, feature films, and audio productions, making him one of the most persistent contributors to the expanded Star Trek universe.

• 5. The Disney Royalty Dispute

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  In 2020, Foster went public with a financial grievance against The Walt Disney Company. The dispute centered on royalties for e-book sales of his Star Wars and Alien novels. Disney had acquired those rights through two separate corporate deals: the purchase of Lucasfilm, which brought the Star Wars catalog, and the acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which brought the Alien material. Foster alleged that Disney had simply stopped paying him for digital sales.

  He was not alone. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America joined the dispute, and it emerged that his fellow Star Wars novelization authors, James Kahn and Donald F. Glut, were in the same position. The case attracted attention both for what it revealed about how legacy publishing contracts can fall through the cracks of massive corporate mergers and for Disney's size relative to the individual authors involved.

  The dispute was resolved in May 2021, when Disney arranged to pay Foster, Kahn, and Glut the royalties they were owed. The resolution came roughly a year after Foster first raised the issue publicly, with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America playing a role in pressing the case.

• 6. Original Worlds and Career Range

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  Beyond his franchise work, Foster built an original science fiction and fantasy catalog that runs to multiple series and more than 20 standalone novels. His Spellsinger series began in 1983 and ran through eight novels, with a related novelette, "Serenade," published in the anthology Masters of Fantasy in 2004 and later reprinted in his collection Exceptions to Reality.

  The Humanx Commonwealth universe forms another major strand of his original work, built across numerous novels over decades. His Damned Trilogy ran from 1991 to 1993. His Journeys of the Catechist trilogy ran from 1998 to 2000. The range of his novelization work is equally wide: it includes The Thing (1981), Pale Rider (1985), Clash of the Titans (1981), and even an entry in the Terminator franchise with Terminator Salvation in 2009.

  In 2008, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers recognized his contributions with the Grand Master award. That award acknowledged a body of work that stretched across animated series books, blockbuster novelizations, audio records, computer game tie-ins such as The Dig in 1995, and original novels, a range few writers in any genre have matched.