‘Novelizationist’ Takes Sci-Fi From the Silver Screen to Printed Page

Alan Dean Foster has run the white waters of the Zambesi and dived among great white sharks and never suffered a scratch. But on a recent visit to his mother’s home in Sherman Oaks, the writer hobbles from room to room.

A few days earlier, Foster messed up his knee playing a fierce pickup basketball game. It is the kind of injury that guys on the cusp of 50 are heir to, and the 49-year-old Foster is slightly abashed.

“It’s the only game I know where you can take a respected lawyer, a doctor, a priest and put them on a court and they act like 12-year-olds,” he says with a laugh. It would be much harder to laugh if his doctor hadn’t just told him that he probably won’t need surgery, and, yes, he will be able to steal the ball once more.

Born in New York City, Foster grew up in the Valley, first in Studio City, then in a pleasant part of Van Nuys that was assumed a few years ago into pricier Sherman Oaks. Foster remembers the first sci-fi book he ever read: “The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree.” He was in fifth grade at Chandler Elementary. His late father, Mickey Foster, was a fan of the genre, so there was always science fiction around the house.

But, while Foster read sci-fi, he didn’t devour it with the same passion he brought to the works of Herman Melville and Carl Barks, “the Wagner of comic books,” who wrote and drew Uncle Scrooge and many of the classic Donald Ducks.

Today Foster’s mother, Helen, proudly displays the covers of his many novels and novelizations in the house where he grew up. She also collects foreign-language versions of his work; Czech and Portuguese editions recently arrived from the publishers.

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From time to time, the San Fernando Valley surfaces in Foster’s work. His story “Why Johnny Can’t Speed” looks ahead to a not-so-distant time when you don’t dare get on the 405 without making sure your missile-equipped Camaro is fully armed. But Foster was no precocious suburban scribbler, transforming every trip to the Galleria or adventure in the Grant High Physics Club into a work of fiction. “I wasn’t one of these 8-year-olds running around with a novel tucked under his arm,” he says. “I didn’t try any serious writing until my senior year in high school.”

While at UCLA getting a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s in film, Foster began writing in many genres, from mystery to love stories, sci-fi stories as well as screenplays. He sold a horror story to Arkham Collector magazine in 1968, but before that appeared, Analog magazine published one of his sci-fi pieces. Science fiction began to look like a career path. “You gravitate to what works.”

In 1972 Foster published his first try at a novel, “The Tar-Aiym Krang,” and quit his day job as a copywriter for a Studio City public-relations firm. He told himself, “I’m one for one, and this beats hell out of getting up in the morning and putting on a suit and tie.”

Suit and tie hardly seem Foster’s style, what with the ponytail and the discreet but undeniable gold stud in one ear.

Foster is in town to promote his new book, “Dinotopia Lost,” published by Turner, the Atlanta-based publishing wing of the Ted Turner empire. Foster has written 50 novels, including the Humanx Commonwealth series, which some regard as his best work. (“I think my short stories are my best work,” he says, “but then, Tchaikovsky thought ‘The Nutcracker Suite’ was the worst piece of crap he ever wrote.”)

Since 1974, Foster has also had a career-within-a-career novelizing movies and TV series. “Dinotopia Lost” isn’t a novelization, Foster points out. It is an original fantasy adventure, set in a utopian world of dinosaurs and people first imagined by artist-writer James Gurney. Foster has written best-selling novelizations of some of the most popular sci-fi movies of all time, including “Star Wars” and the three “Alien” movies.

Asked if doing novelizations has hurt his reputation as a writer, he says yes. Asked if he has any significant regrets, he says no. His substantial income from the novelizations allowed him to quit his part-time teaching job at L.A. City College in 1977 to write full time, in spite of the responsibilities of a family and a mortgage. Other writers often ask him if they should risk working, however skillfully, in a bastard genre, or at least one that gets little respect. His response: “Screw your reputation. If you’re a good writer, people will find your original work.”

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The novelization may be the Rodney Dangerfield of the book world, but Foster views the form, when done well, as a legitimate act of collective creativity, just as the making of a good film is.

“I look at it as a collaboration with John Carpenter, George Lucas or whoever,” he says. (Foster novelized Carpenter’s first film, “Dark Star,” as well as Carpenter’s version of “The Thing.”) Foster has faced some notable challenges in turning movies into books. Director Ridley Scott was so secretive about the protean monster in “Alien” that he wouldn’t let Foster see any drawings of the beast, which is why Foster never describes it.

Foster tries to contribute at least 50% new material to his novelizations. “I approach them as a fan,” he says.

In that spirit, Foster tries in his books to correct any flaws or mistakes he sees in the original, including affronts to scientific plausibility or internal logic that can shatter the illusion of reality at the heart of effective sci-fi. Sometimes he suggests changes to the movie itself, although the industry, the writer believes, often follows the commandment: “Thou shalt not improve a film if it means admitting you made a mistake.” Disney chose to ignore the 77 fixes Foster suggested for its 1979 sci-fi turkey, “The Black Hole.” But Scott either took Foster’s suggestion, or decided independently, that it would be wrong to kill the cat in “Alien.”

As a kid, Foster loved the Natural History Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits, and he knows better than most people that men and dinosaurs never coexisted. (Like so many little boys, Foster developed his dinosaur jones about the time the cord was cut. “I was on ‘The Pinky Lee Show’ when I was 4 reciting dinosaur names.”)

But scientific knowledge didn’t deter him from exploiting man’s almost primal desire to have lived in an age of dinosaurs in his new book. “Every 8-year-old’s dream is to have a pet Tyrannosaurus rex to beat up the neighborhood bully,” he says. He doesn’t remember who said it, but he seconds the view that “dinosaurs are just too big and too wonderful to be ignored.”

Foster, who grew up Jewish and urban, has been married for 21 years to a woman who grew up Baptist in Moran, “a town in west Texas that makes the town in ‘The Last Picture Show’ look like a metropolis.” Jo Ann Oxley Foster manages a blues-rock band called Muddbone.

The Fosters live in Prescott, Ariz., and Jo Ann sometimes stays home when her husband goes off chasing his dream of visiting all the extraordinary places on Earth that haven’t yet been “paved over and turned into shopping malls.” She passed on his recent trip to New Guinea, where reports of cannibalism still crop up with alarming frequency. Jo Ann has a rule, he explains. “She says she’s not going anywhere where the spiders are bigger than the birds.”